M. John Harrison: The Course of the Heart

"Throughout these inane or incompetent speeches--which gave me feelings of nightmare, disorder, the certain failure of everything the ceremony was supposed to represent--the children laughed at every pause, as if they were trying to understand less what to laugh at than when, so that later in life they could measure their responses as accurately by the rhythms of an occasion as by its content."

M. John Harrison The Course of the Heart