Em Forster Love Quotes

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It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.
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E.M. Forster (A Room with a View)
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When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.
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E.M. Forster (A Room with a View)
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This desire to govern a womanβ€”it lies very deep, and men and women must fight it together.... But I do love you surely in a better way than he does." He thought. "Yesβ€”really in a better way. I want you to have your own thoughts even when I hold you in my arms.
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E.M. Forster (A Room with a View)
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After all, is not a real Hell better than a manufactured Heaven?
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E.M. Forster (Maurice)
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You do care a little for me, I know... but nothing to speak of, and you don't love me. I was yours once till death if you'd cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now... and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked, and attend to your own happiness.
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E.M. Forster (Maurice)
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A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense, Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.
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E.M. Forster (Maurice)
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I think you’re beautiful, the only beautiful person I’ve ever seen. I love your voice and everything to do with you, down to your clothes or the room you are sitting in. I adore you.
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E.M. Forster (Maurice)
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Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.
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E.M. Forster (Howards End)
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Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand.
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E.M. Forster
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If we act the truth the people who really love us are sure to come back to us in the long run
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E.M. Forster
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She only felt that the candle would burn better, the packing go easier, the world be happier, if she could give and receive some human love.
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E.M. Forster (A Room with a View)
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When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.
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E.M. Forster (The Life to Come and Other Stories)
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... And now we shan't be parted no more, and that's finished.
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E.M. Forster (Maurice)
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She loved him absolutely, perhaps for half an hour.
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E.M. Forster
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I was yours once 'till death if you'd cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now - I can't hang about whining forever - and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked, and attend to your own happiness?
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E.M. Forster (Maurice)
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Why children?' he asked. 'Why always children? For love to end where it begins is far more beautiful, and Nature knows it.
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E.M. Forster (Maurice)
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I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows.
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E.M. Forster
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It isn’t possible to love and to part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.
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E.M. Forster (A Room with a View)
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She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.
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E.M. Forster (Howards End)
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He educated Maurice, or rather his spirit educated Maurice's spirit, for they themselves became equal. Neither thought "Am I led; am I leading?" Love had caught him out of triviality and Maurice out of bewilderment in order that two imperfect souls might touch perfection.
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E.M. Forster (Maurice)
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She must be assured that it is not a criminal offense to love at first sight.
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E.M. Forster (Howards End)
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When love flies it is remembered not as love but as something else. Blessed are the uneducated, who forget it entirely, and are never conscious of folly or pruriency in the past, of long aimless conversations.
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E.M. Forster (Maurice)
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There was something better in life than this rubΒ­bish, if only he could get to itβ€”loveβ€”nobilityβ€”big spaces where passion clasped peace, spaces no science could reach, but they existed for ever, full of woods some of them, and arched with majestic sky and a friend. . .
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E.M. Forster (Maurice)
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When love flies it is remembered not as love but as something else.
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E.M. Forster (Maurice)
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They had never struggled, and only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.
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E.M. Forster (Maurice)
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Love felt and returned, love which our bodies exact and our hearts have transfigured, love which is the most real thing that we shall ever meet, reappeared now as the world's enemy, and she must stifle it.
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E.M. Forster (A Room with a View)
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The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom.
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E.M. Forster (A Room with a View)
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It's miles worse for you than that; I'm in love with your gamekeeper.
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E.M. Forster (Maurice)
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Perhaps anything that he did would have pleased Lucy, but his awkwardness went straight to her heart.
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E.M. Forster (A Room with a View)
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We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us love one another, and work and rejoice. I don't believe in this world sorrow.
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E.M. Forster (A Room with a View)
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God has put us on earth to love our neighbors and to show it, and He is omnipresent, even in India, to see how we are succeeding.
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E.M. Forster (A Passage to India)
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I only wish the poets would say this too: love is of the body; not the body, but of the the body. Ah! the misery that would be saved if we confessed that! Ah! for a little directness to liberate the soul!
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E.M. Forster (A Room with a View)
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You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.
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E.M. Forster (A Room with a View)
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He had known so much about her once -what she thought, how she felt, the reasons for her actions. And now he only knew that he loved her, and all the other knowledge seemed passing from him just as he needed it most.
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E.M. Forster (Where Angels Fear to Tread)
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Lucy was suffering from the most grievous wrong which this world has yet discovered: diplomatic advantage had been taken of her sincerity, of her craving for sympathy and love. Such a wrong is not easily forgotten. Never again did she expose herself without due consideration and precaution against rebuff. And such a wrong may react disastrously upon the soul.
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E.M. Forster (A Room with a View)
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She loved him with too clear a vision to fear his cloudiness
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E.M. Forster (Howards End)
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For a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; andβ€”by some sad, strange ironyβ€”it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy.
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E.M. Forster (Where Angels Fear to Tread)
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A rebel she was, but not of the kind he understoodβ€”a rebel who desired, not a wider dwelling-room, but equality beside the man she loved.
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E.M. Forster (A Room with a View)
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It is obvious enough for the reader to conclude, "She loves young Emerson." A reader in Lucy's place would not find it obvious. Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice, and we welcome "nerves" or any other shibboleth that will cloak our personal desire. She loved Cecil; George made her nervous; will the reader explain to her that the phrases should have been reversed?
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E.M. Forster (A Room with a View)
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He would not deceive himself so much. He would not – and this was the test – pretend to care about women when the only sex that attracted him was his own. He loved men and always had loved them. He longed to embrace them and mingle his being with theirs. Now that the man who returned his love had been lost, he admitted this.
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E.M. Forster (Maurice)
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Life's very difficult and full of surprises. At all events, I've got as far as that. To be humble and kind, to go straight ahead, to love people rather than pity them, to remember the submerged--well, one can't do all these things at once, worse luck, because they're so contradictory. It's then that proportion comes in--to live by proportion. Don't begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed...
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E.M. Forster (Howards End)
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Man has to pick up the use of his functions as he goes along- especially the function of Love.
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E.M. Forster (A Room with a View)
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They must live outside class, without relations or money; they must work and stick to each other till death. But England belonged to them. That, besides companionship, was their reward. Her air and sky were theirs, not the timorous millions' who own stuffy little boxes, but never their own souls.
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E.M. Forster (Maurice)
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Love and Truth, their warfare seems eternal.
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E.M. Forster (Howards End)
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He had shown her all the workings of his soul, mistaking this for love.
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E.M. Forster (The Longest Journey)
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... and someone he scarcely knew moved towards him and knelt beside him and whispered, 'Sir, was you calling out for me? ... Sir, I know ... I know,' and touched him.
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E.M. Forster (Maurice)
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... I since cricket match do long to talk with one of my arms around you, then place both arms round you and share with you, the above now seems sweeter to me than words can say.
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E.M. Forster (Maurice)
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A happy ending was imperative
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E.M. Forster (Maurice)
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It is only that people are far more different than is pretended. All over the world men and women are worrying because they cannot develop as they are supposed to develop. Here and there they have the matter out, and it comforts them. Don't fret yourself, Helen. Develop what you have; love your child. I do not love children. I am thankful to have none. I can play with their beauty and charm, but that is all - nothing real, not one scrap of what there ought to be. And others - others go farther still, and move outside humanity altogether. A place, as well as a person, may catch the glow. Don't you see that all this leads to comfort in the end? It is part of the battle against sameness. Differences - eternal differences, planted by God in a single family, so that there may always be colour; sorrow, perhaps, but colour in the daily grey.
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E.M. Forster (Howards End)
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If we lived for ever, what you say would be true. But we have to die, we have to leave life presently. Injustice and greed would be the real thing if we lived for ever. As it is, we must hold to other things, because Death is coming. I love death - not morbidly, but because He explains. He shows me the emptiness of Money. Death and Money are the eternal foes. Not Death and Life. . . . Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him. Behind the coffins and the skeletons that stay the vulgar mind lies something so immense that all that is great in us responds to it. Men of the world may recoil from the charnel-house that they will one day enter, but Love knows better. Death is his foe, but his peer, and in their age-long struggle the thews of Love have been strengthened, and his vision cleared, until there is no one who can stand against him.
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E.M. Forster (Howards End)
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I was yours once till death if you cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now--I can't hang about whining for ever--and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked and attend to your own happiness?
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E.M. Forster
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And the triviality faded from their faces, though it left something behind -- the knowledge that they could never be parted because their love was rooted in common things.
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E.M. Forster (Howards End)
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Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralyzed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops - but not on our lies. The Machine proceeds - but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die.
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E.M. Forster (The Machine Stops)
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A rebel she was, but not of the kind he understood - a rebel who desired, not a wider dwelling-room, but equality beside the man she loved. For Italy was offering her the most priceless of all possessions - her own soul.
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E.M. Forster (A Room with a View)
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He never even thought of tenderness and emotion; his considerations about Durham remained cold. Durham didn't dislike him, he was sure. That was all he wanted. One thing at a time. He didn't so much as have hopes, for hope distracts, and he had a great deal to see to.
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E.M. Forster (Maurice)
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Oh, Mr Hall, what an ungallant remark. Look at her lovely hair.' 'I like short hair best.' 'Why?' 'Because I can stroke it-' and he began to cry.
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E.M. Forster (Maurice)
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Love was an emotion through which you occasionally enjoyed yourself. It could not do things.
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E.M. Forster (Maurice)
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Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves himβ€”that is the best account of it that has been yet given. Squalor and tragedy can beckon to all that is great in us; and strengthen the wings of love.
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E.M. Forster (Howards End)
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The second dream is more difficult to convey. Nothing happened. He scarcely saw a face, scarcely heard a voice say, β€œThat is your friend,” and then it was over, having filled him with beauty and taught him tenderness. He could die for such a friend, he would allow such a friend to die for him; they would make any sacrifice for each other, and count the world nothing, neither death nor distance nor crossness could part them, because β€œthis is my friend.
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E.M. Forster (Maurice)
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In other words, they belong to types that could fall in love, but couldn't live together.
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E.M. Forster (Howards End)
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He built up a situation that was far enough from the truth. It never occurred to him that Helen was to blame. He forgot the intensity of their talk, the charm that had been lent him by sincerity, the magic of Oniton under darkness and of the whispering river. Helen loved the absolute. Leonard had been ruined absolutely, and had appeared to her as a man apart, isolated from the world. A real man, who cared for adventure and beauty, who desired to live decently and pay his way, who could have travelled more gloriously through life than the Juggernaut car that was crushing him.
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E.M. Forster (Howards End)
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Remember that it's only by going off the track that you get to know the country...And don't, let me beg you, go with that awful tourist idea that Italy's only a museum of antiquities and art. Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvelous than the land.
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E.M. Forster
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But Italy worked some marvel in her. It gave her light, and – which he held more precious – it gave her shadow. Soon he detected in her a wonderful reticence. She was like a woman of Leonardo da Vinci's, whom we love not so much for herself as for the things that she will not tell us. The things are assuredly not of this life; no woman of Leonardo's could have anything so vulgar as a "story." She did develop most wonderfully day by day.
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E.M. Forster (A Room with a View)
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I only know what it is that's wrong with him; not why it is." And what is it?" asked Lucy fearfully, expecting some harrowing tale. The old trouble; things won't fit." What things?" The things of the universe. It's quite true. They don't." Oh Mr. Emerson, whatever do you mean?" In his ordinary voice, so that she scarcely realized he was quoting poetry, he said: "'From far, from eve and morning, And yon twelve-winded sky, The stuff of life to knit me Blew hither: here am I." George and I both know this, but why does it distress him? We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all of life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us rather love one another, and work and rejoice. I don't believe in this world of sorrow.
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E.M. Forster (A Room with a View)
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Then she turned westward, to gaze at the swirling gold. Just where the river rounded the hill the sun caught it. Fairyland must lie above the bend, and its precious liquid was pouring towards them past Charles's bathing shed.
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E.M. Forster (Howards End)
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It’s a chance in a thousand we’ve met, we’ll never have the chance again and you know it. Stay with me. We love each other.
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E.M. Forster (Maurice)
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Love must confirm an old relation rather than reveal a new one
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E.M. Forster (Howards End)
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Love was so unlike the article served up in books: the joy, though genuine, was different; the mystery an unexpected mystery.
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E.M. Forster (Howards End)
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Eccolo!” he exclaimed. At the same moment the ground gave way, and with a cry she fell out of the wood. Light and beauty enveloped her. She had fallen on to a little open terrace, which was covered with violets from end to end. β€œCourage!” cried her companion, now standing some six feet above. β€œCourage and love.” She did not answer. From her feet the ground sloped sharply into view, and violets ran down in rivulets and streams and cataracts, irrigating the hillside with blue, eddying round the tree stems, collecting into pools in the hollows, covering the grass with spots of azure foam. But never again were they in such profusion; this terrace was the well-head, the primal source whence beauty gushed out to water the earth. Standing at its brink, like a swimmer who prepares, was the good man. But he was not the good man that she had expected, and he was alone. George had turned at the sound of her arrival. For a moment he contemplated her, as one who had fallen out of heaven. He saw radiant joy in her face, he saw the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves. The bushes above them closed. He stepped quickly forward and kissed her…
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E.M. Forster (A Room with a View)
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A slow nature such as Maurice's appears insensitive, for it needs time even to feel. Its instinct is to assume that nothing either for good or evil has happened, and to resist the invader. Once gripped, it feels acutely, and its sensations in love are particularly profound. Given time, it can know and impart ecstasy; given time, it can sink to the heart of Hell.
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E.M. Forster (Maurice)
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Perhaps it was Helen's way of falling in love--a curious way to Margaret, whose agony and whose contempt of Henry were yet imprinted with his image. Helen forgot people. They were husks that had enclosed her emotion.
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E.M. Forster (Howards End)
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He was not sure, but liked it. It recurred when they met suddenly or had been silent. It beckoned to him across intellect, saying, "This is all very well, you're clever, we knowβ€”but come!" It haunted him so that he watched for it while his brain and tongue were busy, and when it came he felt himself replying, "I'll comeβ€”I didn't know." "You can't help yourself now. You must come." "I don't want to help myself." "Come then." He did come. He flung down all the barriersβ€”not at once, for he did not live in a house that can be destroyed in a day.
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E.M. Forster (Maurice)
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Tolerance is a very dull virtue. It is boring. Unlike love, it has always had a bad press. It is negative. It merely means putting up with people, being able to stand things.
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E.M. Forster
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Because we think it improves our characters. But he is kind to people because he loves them; and they find him out, and are offended, or frightened.
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E.M. Forster (A Room with a View and Howards End)
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For all his culture, Cecil was an ascetic at heart, and nothing in his love became him like the leaving of it.
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E.M. Forster (A Room with a View)
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She was like a woman of Leonardo Da Vinci's, whom we love not so much for herself as for the things that she will not tell us.
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E.M. Forster
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The abandonment of personality that is a possible prelude to love
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E.M. Forster (Howards End)
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Something had changed. He had journeyedβ€”as on rare occasions a man mustβ€”till he stood behind right and wrong. On the banks of the grey torrent of life, love is the only flower.
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E.M. Forster (The Longest Journey)
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Love is the best, and the more she let herself love him, the more chance was there that he would set his soul in order.
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E.M. Forster (Howards End)
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Much love. Modified love to Tibby. Love to Aunt Juley; how good of her to come and keep you company, but what a bore.
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E.M. Forster (Howards End)
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In his ordinary voice, so that she scarcely realized he was quoting poetry, he said: "'From far, from eve and morning, And yon twelve-winded sky, The stuff of life to knit me Blew hither: here am I' George and I both know this, but why does it distress him? We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us rather love one another, and work and rejoice. I don't believe in this world sorrow.
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E.M. Forster (A Room with a View)
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This constant reference to genius is another characteristic of the pseudo-scholar. He loves mentioning genius, because the sound of the word exempts him from discovering its meaning.
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E.M. Forster (Aspects of the Novel)
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London was but a foretaste of this nomadic civilization which is altering human nature so profoundly, and throws upon personal relations a stress greater than they have ever borne before. Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle, and the binding force that once exercised on character must be entrusted to Love alone. May Love be equal to the task!
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E.M. Forster (Howards End)
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They had started speaking of "women and children" - that phrase that exempts the male from sanity when it has been repeated a few times. Each felt that all he loved best in the world was at stake, demanded revenge, and was filled with a not unpleasing glow...
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E.M. Forster (A Passage to India)
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No, mother; no. She was really keen on Italy. This travel is quite a crisis for her.” He found the situation full of whimsical romance: there was something half attractive, half repellent in the thought of this vulgar woman journeying to places he loved and revered. Why should she not be transfigured? The same had happened to the Goths.
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E.M. Forster (Where Angels Fear to Tread)
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I belong to a culture that includes Proust, Henry James, Tchaikovsky, Cole Porter, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Tennessee Williams, Byron, E.M. Forster, Lorca, Auden, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, Harry Stack Sullivan, John Maynard Keynes, Dag Hammarskjold… These are not invisible men. Poor Bruce. Poor frightened Bruce. Once upon a time you wanted to be a soldier. Bruce, did you know that an openly gay Englishman was as responsible as any man for winning the Second World War? His name was Alan Turing and he cracked the Germans' Enigma code so the Allies knew in advance what the Nazis were going to do β€” and when the war was over he committed suicide he was so hounded for being gay. Why don't they teach any of this in the schools? If they did, maybe he wouldn't have killed himself and maybe you wouldn't be so terrified of who you are. The only way we'll have real pride is when we demand recognition of a culture that isn't just sexual. It's all thereβ€”all through history we've been there; but we have to claim it, and identify who was in it, and articulate what's in our minds and hearts and all our creative contributions to this earth. And until we do that, and until we organize ourselves block by neighborhood by city by state into a united visible community that fights back, we're doomed. That's how I want to be defined: as one of the men who fought the war.
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Larry Kramer (The Normal Heart)
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You, who have just crossed the Roof of the World, will not want to hear an account of the little hills that I saw β€” low, colorless hills. But to me they were living and the turf that covered them was a skin, under which their muscles rippled, and I felt that those hills had called with incalculable force to men in the past, and that men had loved them. Now they sleep β€” perhaps for ever. They commune with humanity in dreams.
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E.M. Forster (The Machine Stops)
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Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralysed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops β€” but not on our lines. The Machine proceeds β€” but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die.
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E.M. Forster (The Machine Stops)
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By God, if you'd split on me to Mr Ducie, I'd have broken you. It might have cost me hundreds, but I've got them, and the police always back my sort against yours. You don't know. We'd have got you into quod, for blackmail, after which β€” I'd have blown out my brains.' 'Killed yourself? Death?' 'I should have known by that time that I loved you. Too late . . . everything's always too late.
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E.M. Forster (Maurice)
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It so happened that Lucy, who found daily life rather chaotic, entered a more solid world when she opened the piano. She was then no longer either deferential or patronizing; no longer either a rebel or a slave. The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom. Lucy had done so never.
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E.M. Forster (A Room with a View)
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They had started speaking of β€œwomen and children”—that phrase that exempts the male from sanity when it has been repeated a few times. Each felt that all he loved best in the world was at stake, demanded revenge, and was filled with a not unpleasing glow, in which the chilly and half-known features of Miss Quested vanished, and were replaced by all that is sweetest and warmest in private life. β€œBut it’s the women and children,” they repeated, and the Collector knew he ought to stop them intoxicating themselves, but he hadn’t the heart.
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E.M. Forster
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He held out his hand, Maurice took it, and they knew at that moment the greatest triumph ordinary man can win. Physical love means reaction, being panic in essence, and Maurice saw now how natural it was that their primitive abandonment at Penge should have led to peril. They knew too little about each other - and too much. Hence fear. Hence cruelty. And he rejoiced because he had understood Alec's infamy through his own - glimpsing, not for the first time, the genius who hides in man's tormented soul. Not as a hero, but as a comrade, had he stood up to the bluster, and found childishness behind it, and behind that something else.
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E.M. Forster (Maurice)
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Whom does Love concern beyond the beloved and the lover? Yet his impact deluges a hundred shores. No doubt the disturbance is really the spirit of the generations, welcoming the new generations, and chafing against the ultimate Fate, who holds all the seas in the palm of her hand. But Love cannot understand this. He cannot comprehend another's infinity; he is conscious only of his own--flying sunbeam, falling rose, pebble that asks for one quiet plunge below the fretting interplay of space and time.
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E.M. Forster (Howards End)
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What had spoken to her in that scoured-out cavity of the granite? What dwelt in the first of the caves? Something very old and very small. Before time, it was before space also. Something snub-nosed, incapable of generosity -- the undying worm itself. Since hearing its voice, she had not entertained one large thought, she was actually envious of Adela. All this fuss over a frightened girl! Nothing had happened, 'and if it had,' she found herself thinking with the cynicism of a withered priestess, 'if it had there are worse evils than love.' The unspeakable attempt presented itself to her as love: in a cave, in a church -- Boum, it amounts to the same. Visions are supposed to entail profundity, but -- Wait till you get one, dear reader! The abyss also may be petty, the serpent of eternity made of maggots; her constant thought was: 'Less attention should be paid to my future daughter-in-law and more to me, there is no sorrow like my sorrow,' although when the attention was paid she rejected it irritably.
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E.M. Forster (A Passage to India)
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I’ve often thought about it, Helen. It’s one of the most interesting things in the world. The truth is that there is a great outer life that you and I have never touchedβ€”a life in which telegrams and anger count. Personal relations, that we think supreme, are not supreme there. There love means marriage settlements, death, death duties. So far I’m clear. But here my difficulty. This outer life, though obviously horrid, often seems the real oneβ€”there’s grit in it. It does breed character. Do personal relations lead to sloppiness in the end?
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E.M. Forster (A Room with a View and Howards End: (A Modern Library E-Book))
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Beware of first-hand ideas!” exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. β€œFirst-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element β€” direct observation. Do not learn anything about this subject of mine β€” the French Revolution.Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho-Yung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought Lafcadio Hearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution. Through the medium of these ten great minds, the blood that was shed at Paris and the windows that were broken at Versailles will be clarified to an idea which you may employ most profitably in your daily lives. But be sure that the intermediates are many and varied, for in history one authority exists to counteract another. Urizen must counteract the scepticism of Ho-Yung and Enicharmon, I must myself counteract the impetuosity of Gutch. You who listen to me are in a better position to judge about the French Revolution than I am. Your descendants will be even in a better position than you, for they will learn what you think I think, and yet another intermediate will be added to the chain. And in time” β€” his voice rose β€” β€œthere will come a generation that had got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation β€˜seraphically free From taint of personality,’ which will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine.
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E.M. Forster (The Machine Stops)
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…”The Emersons who were at Florence, do you mean? No, I don’t suppose it will prove to be them. It is probably a long cry from them to friends of Mr. Vyse’s. Oh, Mrs. Honeychurch, the oddest people! The queerest people! For our part we liked them, didn’t we?” He appealed to Lucy. β€œThere was a great scene over some violets. They picked violets and filled all the vases in the room of these very Miss Alans who have failed to come to Cissie Villa. Poor little ladies! So shocked and so pleased. It used to be one of Miss Catharine’s great stories. β€˜My dear sister loves flowers,’ it began. They found the whole room a mass of blue β€” vases and jugs β€” and the story ends with β€˜So ungentlemanly and yet so beautiful.’ It is all very difficult. Yes, I always connect those Florentine Emersons with violets.”…
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E.M. Forster (A Room with a View)
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But this is something quite new!" said Mrs. Munt, who collected new ideas as a squirrel collects nuts, and was especially attracted by those that are portable. "New for me; sensible people have acknowledged it for years. You and I and the Wilcoxes stand upon money as upon islands. It is so firm beneath our feet that we forget its very existence. It's only when we see someone near us tottering that we realize all that an independent income means. Last night, when we were talking up here round the fire, I began to think that the very soul of the world is economic, and that the lowest abyss is not the absence of love, but the absence of coin." "I call that rather cynical." "So do I. But Helen and I, we ought to remember, when we are tempted to criticize others, that we are standing on these islands, and that most of the others are down below the surface of the sea. The poor cannot always reach those whom they want to love, and they can hardly ever escape from those whom they love no longer. We rich can. Imagine the tragedy last June if Helen and Paul Wilcox had been poor people and could not invoke railways and motor-cars to part them." "That's more like Socialism," said Mrs. Munt suspiciously. "Call it what you like. I call it going through life with one's hand spread open on the table. I'm tired of these rich people who pretend to be poor, and think it shows a nice mind to ignore the piles of money that keep their feet above the waves. I stand each year upon six hundred pounds, and Helen upon the same, and Tibby will stand upon eight, and as fast as our pounds crumble away into the sea they are renewedβ€”from the sea, yes, from the sea. And all our thoughts are the thoughts of six-hundred-pounders, and all our speeches; and because we don't want to steal umbrellas ourselves, we forget that below the sea people do want to steal them, and do steal them sometimes, and that what's a joke up here is down there realityβ€”
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E.M. Forster (Howards End)
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She was no dazzling exΓ©cutante; her runs were not at all like stings of pearls, an she struck no more right notes than was suitable for one of her age and situation. Nor was she the passionate young lady, who performs so tragically on a summer's evening with the window open. Passion was there, but it could not be easily labelled; it slipped between love and hatred and jealousy, and all the furniture of the pictorial style. And she was tragical only in the sense that she was great, for she loved to play in the side of Victory. Victory of what and over what - that is more than words of daily life can tell us. But that some sonatas of Beethoven are written tragic no one can gainsay; yet they can triumph or despair as the player decides, and Lucy had decided that they should triumph.
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E.M. Forster (A Room with a View)
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All invitations must proceed from heaven perhaps; perhaps it is futile for men to initiate their own unity, they do but widen the gulfs between them by the attempt. So at all events thought old Mr. Graysford and young Mr. Sorley, the devoted missionaries who lived out beyond the slaughterhouses, always travelled third on the railways, and never came to the club. In our Father's house are many mansions, they taught, and there alone will the incompatible multitudes of mankind be welcomed and soothed. Not one shall be turned away by the servants on that verandah, be he black or white, not one shall be kept standing who approaches with a loving heart. And why should the divine hospitality cease here? Consider, with all reverence, the monkeys. May there not be a mansion for the monkeys also? Old Mr. Graysford said No, but young Mr. Sorley, who was advanced, said Yes; he saw no reason why monkeys should not have their collateral share of bliss, and he had sympathetic discussions about them with his Hindu friends. And the jackals? Jackals were indeed less to Mr. Sorley's mind but he admitted that the mercy of God, being infinite, may well embrace all mammals. And the wasps? He became uneasy during the descent to wasps, and was apt to change the conversation. And oranges, cactuses, crystals and mud? and the bacteria inside Mr. Sorley? No, no, this is going too far. We must exclude someone from our gathering, or we shall be left with nothing.
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E.M. Forster (A Passage to India)