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The Historian Must Have Some Conception Of How Men Who Are Not Historians Behave. Otherwise He Will Move In A World Of The Dead. He Can Only Gain That Conception Through Personal Experience, And He Can Only Use His Personal Experiences When He Is A Genius.

-E. M. Forster

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The Historian Must Have

E. M. Forster

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The Historian Must Have Some Conception Of How Men Who Are Not Historians Behave. Otherwise He Will Move In A World Of The Dead. He Can Only Gain That Conception Through Personal Experience, And He Can Only Use His Personal Experiences When He Is A Genius.

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The Advance Of Regret Can Be So Gradual That It Is Impossible To Say "yesterday I Was Happy, Today I Am Not.

I Don't Think Literature Will Be Purged Until Its Philosophic Pretentiousness Is Extruded, And I Shant Live To See That Purge, Nor Perhaps When It Has Happened Will Anything Survive.

Paganism Is Infectious, More Infectious Than Diphtheria Or Piety.

While Her Lips Talked Culture, Her Heart Was Planning To Invite Him To Tea

Let Her Go To Italy!" He Cried. "let Her Meddle With What She Doesn't Understand!

Chess Is A Forcing House Where The Fruits Of Character Can Ripen More Fully Than In Life

Don't Go Fighting Against The Spring.

If Miss Honeychurch Ever Takes To Live As She Plays, It Will Be Very Exciting--both For Us And For Her.

There's Enough Sorrow In The World, Isn't There, Without Trying To Invent It.

It Is Not That The Englishman Can't Feel-it Is That He Is Afraid To Feel. He Has Been Taught At His Public School That Feeling Is Bad Form. He Must Not Express Great Joy Or Sorrow, Or Even Open His Mouth Too Wide When He Talks-his Pipe Might Fall Out If He Did.

Human Beings Have Their Great Chance In The Novel.

I Am Actually What My Age And My Upbringing Have Made Me - A Bourgeois Who Adheres To The British Constitution, Adheres To It Rather Than Supports It, And The Fact That This Isn't Dignified Doesn't Worry Me.

There Was Something Better In Life Than This Rubbish, If Only He Could Get To It—love—nobility—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. . .

Reformers Who Are Obsessed With Purity And Cannot See That Their Obsession Is Impure.

Their Quarrel Was No More Surprising Than Are Most Quarrels — Inevitable At The Time, Incredible Afterwards.

One Person With Passion Is Better Than Forty People Merely Interested.

Give, Do Not Lend; After Death Who Will Thank You?

Man Has To Pick Up The Use Of His Functions As He Goes Along- Especially The Function Of Love.

Even A Fellow With A Camera Has His Favourite Subjects, As We Can See Looking Through The Kodak-albums Of Our Friends. One Amateur Prefers The Family Group, Another Bathing Scenes, Another Cows Upon An Alp, Or Kittens Held Upside Down In The Arms Of A Black-faced Child. The Tendency To Choose One Subject Rather Than Another Indicates The Photographer's Temperament. Nevertheless, His Passion Is For Photography Rather Than For Selection, A Kitten Will Serve When No Cows Are Available.

Very Notable Was His Distinction Between Coarseness And Vulgarity, Coarseness, Revealing Something; Vulgarity, Concealing Something.

Revealing Something

A Novelist Can Shift View-point If It Comes Off. ... Indeed, This Power To Expand And Contract Perception (of Which The Shifting View-point Is A Symptom), This Right To Intermittent Knowledge - I Find One Of The Great Advantages Of The Novel-form ... This Intermittence Lends In The Long Run Variety And Colour To The Experiences We Receive.

England Still Waits For The Supreme Moment Of Her Literature--for The Great Poet Who Shall Voice Her, Or, Better Still, For The Thousand Little Poets Whose Voices Shall Pass Into Our Common Talk.

It Is Thus, If There Is Any Rule, That We Ought To Die--neither As Victim Nor As Fanatic, But As The Seafarer Who Can Greet With An Equal Eye The Deep That He Is Entering, And The Shore That He Must Leave.

I Am So Used To Seeing The Sort Of Play Which Deals With One Man And Two Women. They Do Not Leave Me With The Feeling I Have Made A Full Theatrical Meal They Do Not Give Me The Experience Of The Multiplicity Of Life.

The Hungry And The Homeless Don't Care About Liberty Any More Than They Care About Cultural Heritage. To Pretend That They Do Care Is Cant.

There Are Occasions When I Would Rather Feel Like A Fly Than A Spider.

An Acquaintance Had Become A Lover, Might Become A Husband, But Would Retain All That She Had Noted In The Acquaintance; And Love Must Confirm An Old Relation Rather Than Reveal A New One.

Love Is A Great Force In Private Life; It Is Indeed The Greatest Of All Things; But Love In Public Affairs Does Not Work.

The Four Characteristics Of Humanism Are Curiosity, A Free Mind, Belief In Good Taste, And Belief In The Human Race.

But This Time I'm Not To Blame; I Want You To Believe That. I Simply Slipped Into Those Violets. No, I Want To Be Really Truthful. I Am A Little To Blame. The Sky, You Know, Was Gold, And The Ground All Blue, And For A Moment He Looked Like Some One In A Book.

He Had Shown Her All The Workings Of His Soul, Mistaking This For Love.

One Must Be Fond Of People And Trust Them If One Is Not To Make A Mess Of Life.

The People I Respect Most Behave As If They Were Immortal And As If Society Was Eternal. Both Assumptions Are False: Both Of Them Must Be Accepted As True If We Are To Go On Eating And Working And Loving, And Are To Keep Open A Few Breathing Holes For The Human Spirit.

... There Are Shadows Because There Are Hills.

Room With A View

But Nothing In India Is Identifiable, The Mere Asking Of A Question Causes It To Disappear Or To Merge In Something Else.

One Is Certain Of Nothing But The Truth Of One's Own Emotions.

She Must Be Assured That It Is Not A Criminal Offense To Love At First Sight.

English Literature Is A Flying Fish.

I Do Not Believe In Belief.

History Develops, Art Stands Still.

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.

Nature Pulls One Way And Human Nature Another.

Some Reviews Give Pain. This Is Regrettable, But No Author Has The Right To Whine. He Was Not Obliged To Be An Author. He Invited Publicity, And He Must Take The Publicity That Comes Along.

Humility Is A Quality For Which I Have Only A Limited Admiration. In Many Phases Of Life It Is A Great Mistake And Degenerates Into Defensiveness Or Hypocrisy.

Axiom : Novel Must Have Either One Living Character Or A Perfect Pattern: Fails Otherwise.

You Told Me Once That We Shall Be Judged By Our Intentions, Not By Our Accomplishments. I Thought It A Grand Remark. But We Must Intend To Accomplish - Not Sit Intending On A Chair.

Neanderthal Man Listened To Stories, If One May Judge By The Shape Of His Skull.

Intuition Attracts Those Who Wish To Be Spiritual Without Any Bother, Because It Promises A Heaven Where The Intuitions Of Others Can Be Ignored.

My Law-givers Are Erasmus And Montaigne, Not Moses And St Paul.

The Strong Are So Stupid.

The Emotions May Be Endless. The More We Express Them, The More We May Have To Express.

How Can The Mind Take Hold Of Such A Country? Generations Of Invaders Have Tried, But They Remain In Exile. The Important Towns They Build Are Only Retreats, Their Quarrels The Malaise Of Men Who Cannot Find Their Way Home. India Knows Of Their Trouble. She Knows Of The Whole World's Trouble, To Its Uttermost Depth. She Calls "come" Through Her Hundred Mouths, Through Objects Ridiculous And August. But Come To What? She Has Never Defined. She Is Not A Promise, Only An Appeal.

Surely The Only Sound Foundation For A Civilization Is A Sound State Of Mind.

Democracy Is Not A Beloved Republic Really, And Never Will Be. But It Is Less Hateful Than Other Contemporary Forms Of Government, And To That Extent Deserves Our Support.

A Novel Is Based On Evidence, + Or -x, The Unknown Quantity Being The Temperament Of The Novelist, And The Unknown Quantity Always Modifies The Effect Of The Evidence, And Sometimes Transforms It Entirely.

Oxford Is Oxford: Not A Mere Receptacle For Youth, Like Cambridge. Perhaps It Wants Its Inmates To Love It Rather Than To Love One Another.

The Novel Is A Formidable Mass, And It Is So Amorphous - No Mountain In It To Climb, No Parnassus Or Helicon, Not Even A Pisgah. It Is Most Distinctly One Of The Moister Areas Of Literature - Irrigated By A Hundred Rills And Occasionally Degenerating Into A Swamp. I Do Not Wonder That The Poets Despise It, Though They Sometimes Find Themselves In It By Accident. And I Am Not Surprised At The Annoyance Of The Historians When By Accident It Finds Itself Among Them.

At Times Our Need For A Sympathetic Gesture Is So Great That We Care Not What Exactly It Signifies Or How Much We May Have To Pay For It Afterwards.

It Is The Vice Of A Vulgar Mind To Be Thrilled By Bigness.

We Are All Like Scheherazade's Husband, In That We Want To Know What Happens Next.

I Distrust Great Men. They Produce A Desert Of Uniformity Around Them And Often A Pool Of Blood Too, And I Always Feel A Little Man's Pleasure When They Come A Cropper.

The Fact Is We Can Only Love What We Know Personally. And We Cannot Know Much. In Public Affairs, In The Rebuilding Of Civilization, Something Less Dramatic And Emotional Is Needed, Namely Tolerance.

All A Child's Life Depends On The Ideal It Has Of Its Parents. Destroy That And Everything Goes — Morals, Behaviour, Everything. Absolute Trust In Some One Else Is The Essence Of Education.

Culture Had Worked In Her Own Case, But During The Last Few Weeks She Had Doubted Whether It Humanized The Majority, So Wide And So Widening Is The Gulf That Stretches Between The Natural And The Philosophic Man, So Many The Good Chaps Who Are Wrecked In Trying To Cross It.

Sudden Conversion ... Is Particularly Attractive To The Half-baked Mind.

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.

But The Body Is Deeper Than The Soul And Its Secrets Inscrutable.

You Want To Love Everyone Equally, And That's Worse Than Impossible--it's Wrong.

Those Who Prepared For All The Emergencies Of Life Beforehand May Equip Themselves At The Expense Of Joy.

You Talk As If A God Had Made The Machine," Cried The Other. "i Believe That You Pray To It When You Are Unhappy. Men Made It, Do Not Forget That. Great Men, But Men. The Machine Is Much, But Not Everything.

Think Before You Speak Is Criticism's Motto; Speak Before You Think, Creation's.

Ulysses ... Is A Dogged Attempt To Cover The Universe With Mud, An Inverted Victorianism, An Attempt To Make Crossness And Dirt Succeed Where Sweetness And Light Failed, A Simplification Of The Human Character In The Interests Of Hell.

Romance Only Dies With Life. No Pair Of Pincers Will Ever Pull It Out Of Us. But There Is A Spurious Sentiment Which Cannot Resist The Unexpected And The Incongruous And The Grotesque. A Touch Will Loosen It, And The Sooner It Goes From Us The Better.

The King Died And Then The Queen Died Is A Story. The King Died, And Then Queen Died Of Grief Is A Plot.

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!

The Present Flowed By Them Like A Stream. The Tree Rustled. It Had Made Music Before They Were Born, And Would Continue After Their Deaths, But Its Song Was Of The Moment. The Moment Had Passed. The Tree Rustled Again. Their Senses Were Sharpened, And They Seemed To Apprehend Life. Life Passed. The Tree Rustled Again.

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.

For It Is A Serious Thing To Have Been Watched. We All Radiate Something Curiously Intimate When We Believe Ourselves To Be Alone.

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.

Our Final Experience, Like Our First, Is Conjectural. We Move Between Two Darkness's.

Letters Have To Pass Two Tests Before They Can Be Classed As Good: They Must Express The Personality Both Of The Writer And Of The Recipient.

How Few Writers Can Prostitute All Their Powers!

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. Only Connect, And The Beast And The Monk, Robbed Of The Isolation That Is Life To Either, Will Die.

It's Miles Worse For You Than That; I'm In Love With Your Gamekeeper.

One Of The Evils Of Money Is That It Tempts Us To Look At It Rather Than At The Things That It Buys.

The Test Of A Round Character Is Whether It Is Capable Of Surprising In A Convincing Way. If It Never Surprises It Is Flat. Flat Characters ... In Their Purest Form ... Are Constructed Round A Single Idea Or Quality; When There Is More Than One Factor To Them, We Get The Beginning Of The Curve Toward The Round. The Really Flat Character Can Be Experessed In One Sentence Such As, "i Will Never Desert Mr Micawber." There Is Mrs Micawber - She Says She Won't Desert Mr Micawber; She Doesn't, And There She Is.

Like All Her Friends, I Miss Her Greatly...but...i Am Sure There Is No Case For Lamentation...virginia Woolf Got Through An Immense Amount Of Work, She Gave Acute Pleasure In New Ways, She Pushed The Light Of The English Language A Little Further Against Darkness. Those Are Facts.

Passion Does Not Blind. No. Passion Is Sanity, And The Woman You Love, She Is The Only Person You Will Ever Really Understand.

It Is The Vice Of A Vulgar Mind To Be Thrilled By Bigness, To Think That A Thousand Square Miles Are A Thousand Times More Wonderful Than One Square Mile, And That A Million Square Miles Are Almost The Same As Heaven.

. . . Life Is Sometimes Life And Sometimes Only A Drama, And One Must Learn To Distinguish T'other From Which . . .

A Poem Is True If It Hangs Together. Information Points To Something Else. A Poem Points To Nothing But Itself.

It Is Easy To Face Death And Fate, And The Things That Sound So Dreadful. It Is On My Muddles That I Look Back With Horror--on Thethings That I Might Have Avoided.

The Main Facts In Human Life Are Five: Birth, Food, Sleep, Love And Death.

Adventures Do Occur, But Not Punctually.

Don't Believe Those Lies About Intellectual People. They're Only Written To Soothe The Majority.

The So Called White Races Are Really Pinko-grey.

I Am An Unspeakable Of The Oscar Wilde Sort.

I Have Almost Completed A Long Novel, But It Is Unpublishable Until My Death And England's.

We Are Not Concerned With The Very Poor. They Are Unthinkable, And Only To Be Approached By The Statistician Or The Poet.

This Element Of Surprise Or Mystery The Detective Element As It Is Sometimes Rather Emptily Called Is Of Great Importance In A Plot.

Truth Is A Flower In Whose Neighbourhood Others Must Wither.

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.

Take An Old Man's Word; There's Nothing Worse Than A Muddle In All The World. It Is Easy To Face Death And Fate, And The Things That Sound So Dreadful. It Is On My Muddles That I Look Back With Horror - On The Things That I Might Have Avoided. We Can Help One Another But Little. I Used To Think I Could Teach Young People The Whole Of Life, But I Know Better Now, And All My Teaching Of George Has Come Down To This: Beware Of Muddle.

The Businessman Who Assumes That His Life Is Everything, And The Mystic Who Asserts That It Is Nothing, Fail, On This Side And On That, To Hit The Truth. ‘yes, I See, Dear; It’s About Half-way Between,’ Aunt Juley Had Hazarded In Earlier Years. No; Truth, Being Alive, Was Not Halfway Between Anything. It Was Only To Be Found By Continuous Excursions Into Either Realm, And Though Proportion Is The Final Secret, To Espouse It At The Outset Is To Ensure Sterility.

But I Have Seen My Obstacles: Trivialities, Learning And Poetry. This Last Needs Explaining: The Old Artist's Readiness To Dissolve Characters Into A Haze. Characters Cannot Come Alive And Fight And Guide The World Unless The Novelist Wants Them To Remain Characters.

Then She Lay On Her Back And Gazed At The Cloudless Sky. Mr. Beebe, Whose Opinion Of Her Rose Daily, Whispered To His Niece That That Was The Proper Way To Behave If Any Little Thing Went Wrong.

It Is So Difficult - At Least, I Find It Difficult - To Understand People Who Speak The Truth.

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?

It Is Impossible To Foretell The Future With Any Degree Of Accuracy, That It Is Impossible To Rehearse Life. A Fault In The Scenery, A Face In The Audience, An Interruption Of The Audience On To The Stage, And All Our Carefully Planned Gesture Mean Nothing, Or Mean Too Much.

I Have Said That Each Aspect Of The Novel Demands A Different Quality Of The Reader. Well, The Prophetic Aspect Demands Two Qualities: Humility And The Suspension Of The Sense Of Humour.

Books Have To Be Read (worse Luck It Takes So Long A Time). It Is The Only Way Of Discovering What They Contain. A Few Savage Tribes Eat Them, But Reading Is The Only Method Of Assimilation Revealed To The West.

It Isn't Possible To Love And To Part.

Room With A View

Life Never Gives Us What We Want At The Moment That We Consider Appropriate.

It Is Never Possible For A Novelist To Deny Time Inside The Fabric Of His Novel: He Must Cling, However Lightly, To The Thread Of His Story, He Must Touch The Interminable Tapeworm, Otherwise He Becomes Unintelligible, Which, In His Case, Is A Blunder.

At Night, When The Curtains Are Drawn And The Fire Flickers, My Books Attain A Collective Dignity.

If Only The Sense Of Actuality Can Be Lulled-and It Sleeps For Ever In Most Historians-there Is No Passion That Cannot Be Gratified In The Past.

You Can Transmute Love, Ignore It, Muddle It, But You Can Never Pull It Out Of You.

Room With A View

When Love Flies It Is Remembered Not As Love But As Something Else.

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.

Men Yearn For Poetry Though They May Not Confess It; They Desire That Joy Shall Be Graceful And Sorrow August And Infinity Have A Form.

I Hated The Idleness, The Stupidity, The Respectability, The Petty Unselfishness.

Hope, Politeness, The Blowing Of A Nose, The Squeak Of A Boot, All Produce "boum.

Belfastas Uncivilised As Ever--savage Black Mothers In Houses Of Dark Red Brick, Friendly Manufacturers Too Drunk To Entertain You When You Arrive. It Amuses Me Till I Get Tired.

A Novel Must Give A Sense Of Permanence As Well As A Sense Of Life.

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.

Falling In Love

Works Of Art, In My Opinion, Are The Only Objects In The Material Universe To Possess Internal Order, And That Is Why, Though I Don't Believe That Only Art Matters, I Do Believe In Art For Art's Sake.

Do Not Be Proud Of Your Inconsistency. It Is A Pity, It Is A Pity That We Should Be Equipped Like This. It Is A Pity That Man Cannot Be At The Same Time Impressive And Truthful.

I Believe We Shall Come To Care About People Less And Less, Helen. The More People One Knows, The Easier It Becomes To Replace Them. It's One Of The Curses Of London. I Quite Expect To End My Life Caring Most For A Place.

It Makes A Difference Doesn't It, Whether We Fully Fence Ourselves In, Or Whether We Are Fenced Out By The Barriers Of Others?

Making A Difference

But After All, What Have We To Do With Taverns? Real Menace Belongs To The Drawing-room.

What Is The Good Of Your Stars And Trees, Your Sunrise And The Wind, If They Do Not Enter Into Our Daily Lives? They Have Never Entered Into Mine, But Into Yours, We Thought--haven't We All To Struggle Against Life's Daily Greyness, Against Pettiness, Against Mechanical Cheerfulness, Against Suspicion? I Struggle By Remembering My Friends; Others I Have Known By Remembering Some Place--some Beloved Place Or Tree--we Thought You One Of These.

Characters Must Not Brood Too Long. They Must Not Waste Time Running Up And Down Ladders In Their Own Insides.

One Always Tends To Overpraise A Long Book, Because One Has Got Through It.

I'm A Holy Man Minus The Holiness. Hand That On To Your Three Spies, And Tell Them To Put It In Their Pipes.

Freedom Does Not Guarantee Masterpieces.

Railway Termini Are Our Gates To The Glorious And The Unknown. Through Them We Pass Out Into Adventure And Sunshine, To Them, Alas! We Return.

Liking One Person Is An Extra Reason For Liking Another.

Don't Be Mysterious; There Isn't The Time.

Faith, To My Mind, Is A Stiffening Process, A Sort Of Mental Starch.

The Most Successful Career Must Show A Waste Of Strength That Might Have Removed Mountains, And The Most Unsuccessful Is Not That Of The Man Who Is Taken Unprepared, But Of Him Who Has Prepared And Is Never Taken.

I Love Love I Love Being In Love I Don't Care What It Does To Me The Format, In "inches And Failing". Masood, A Young Lady Has Fallen In Love With Me-at Least So I Judge From Her Letters. Awkward Is It Not-awkward And Surprising. You Would Be Flattered And Twirl Your Moustache, But I Am Merely Uncomfortable. I Wish She Would Stop, As She Is Very Nice, And I Enjoyed Being Friends. What An Ill Constructed World This Is! Love Is Always Being Given Where It Is Not Required.

Expansion, That Is The Idea The Novelist Must Cling To, Not Completion, Not Rounding Off, But Opening Out.

Naked I Came Into The World, Naked I Shall Go Out Of It! And A Very Good Thing Too, For It Reminds Me That I Am Naked Under My Shirt, Whatever Its Colour.

Aziz Winked At Him Slowly And Said: “...there Are Many Ways Of Being A Man; Mine Is To Express What Is Deepest In My Heart.

Science Explained People, But Could Not Understand Them. After Long Centuries Among The Bones And Muscles It Might Be Advancing To Knowledge Of The Nerves, But This Would Never Give Understanding

It Was Pleasant To Wake Up In Florence, To Open The Eyes Upon A Bright Bare Room, With A Floor Of Red Tiles Which Look Clean Though They Are Not; With A Painted Ceiling Whereon Pink Griffins And Blue Amorini Sport In A Forest Of Yellow Violins And Bassoons. It Was Pleasant, Too, To Fling Wide The Windows, Pinching The Fingers In Unfamiliar Fastenings, To Lean Out Into Sunshine With Beautiful Hills And Trees And Marble Churches Opposite, And, Close Below, Arno, Gurgling Against The Embankment Of The Road.

Ideas Are Fatal To Caste.

If Human Nature Does Alter It Will Be Because Individuals Manage To Look At Themselves In A New Way. Here And There People - A Very Few People, But A Few Novelists Are Among Them - Are Trying To Do This. Every Institution And Vested Interest In Against Such A Search: Organized Religion, The State, The Family In Its Economic Aspect, Have Nothing To Gain, And It Is Only When Outward Prohibitions Weaken That It Can Proceed: History Conditions It To That Extent.

Logic! Good Gracious! What Rubbish!

Do You Suppose There's Any Difference Between Spring In Nature And Spring In Man? But There We Go, Praising The One And Condemning The Other As Improper, Ashamed That The Same Laws Work Eternally Through Both.

Love Is Always Being Given Where It Is Not Required.

A Facade Of Skyscrapers Facing A Lake And Behind The Facade, Every Type Of Dubiousness.

When We Were Only Acquaintances, You Let Me Be Myself, But Now You're Always Protecting Me... I Won't Be Protected. I Will Choose For Myself What Is Ladylike And Right. To Shield Me Is An Insult. Can't I Be Trusted To Face The Truth But I Must Get It Second-hand Through You? A Woman's Place!

To Make Us Feel Small In The Right Way Is A Function Of Art; Men Can Only Make Us Feel Small In The Wrong Way.

It Comes To This Then: There Always Have Been People Like Me And Always Will Be, And Generally They Have Been Persecuted.

No One Is More Triumphant Than The Man Who Chooses A Worthy Subject And Masters All Its Facts.

There Are Moments When The Inner Life Actually 'pays,' When Years Of Self-scrutiny, Conducted For No Ulterior Motive, Are Suddenly Of Practical Use.

Be Soft, Even If You Stand To Get Squashed.

The Idea That Nations Should Love One Another, Or That Business Concerns Or Marketing Boards Should Love One Another, Or That A Man In Portugal Should Love A Man In Peru Of Whom He Has Never Heard -it Is Absurd, Unreal, Dangerous. The Fact Is We Can Only Love What We Know Personally. And We Cannot Know Much.

What The World Most Needs Today Are Negative Virtues - Not Minding People, Not Being Huffy, Touchy, Irritable Or Revengeful.

I Would Rather Be A Coward Than Brave Because People Hurt You When You Are Brave.

A Funeral Is Not Death, Any More Than Baptism Is Birth Or Marriage Union. All Three Are The Clumsy Devices, Coming Now Too Late, Now Too Early, By Which Society Would Register The Quick Motions Of Man.

Suspense: The Only Literary Tool That Has Any Effect Upon Tyrants And Savages.

Towns Are After All Excrescences, Grey Fluxions, Where Men, Hurrying To Find One Another, Have Lost Themselves.

Curiosity Is One Of The Lowest Of The Human Faculties. You Will Have Noticed In Daily Life That When People Are Inquisitive They Nearly Always Have Bad Memories And Are Usually Stupid At Bottom.

Words Deserted Him Immediately. He Could Only Speak When He Was Not Asked To.

There Lies At The Back Of Every Creed Something Terrible And Hard For Which The Worshipper May One Day Be Required To Suffer.

I Don't Know What To Think Until I See What I've Said.

So, Two Cheers For Democracy: One Because It Admits Variety And Two Because It Permits Criticism.

Democracies Have

The Historian Records, But The Novelist Creates.

A Critic Has No Right To The Narrowness Which Is The Frequent Prerogative Of The Creative Artist.

Sometimes I Think Too Much Fuss Is Made About Marriage. Century After Century Of Carnal Embracement And We're Still No Nearer To Understanding One Another.

Excuse My Mistakes, Realize My Limitations. Life Is Not Easy As We Know It On The Earth.

For Our Vanity Is Such That We Hold Our Own Characters Immutable, And We Are Slow To Acknowledge That They Have Changed, Even For The Better.

If There Is On Earth A House With Many Mansions, It Is The House Of Words.

Only A Writer Who Has The Sense Of Evil Can Make Goodness Readable.

Charm, In Most Men And Nearly All Women, Is A Decoration.

Not Only In Sex, But In All Things Men Have Moved Blindly, Have Evolved Out Of Slime To Dissolve Into It When This Accident Of Consequences Is Over.

When That Strange Race Nears The Dust And Is Condemned As Untouchable, Then Nature Remembers The Physical Perfection That She Accomplished Elsewhere, And Throws Out A God-not Many, But One Here And There, To Prove To Society How Little Its Categories Impress Her.

In Europe Life Retreats Out Of The Cold, And Exquisite Fireside Myths Have Resulted—balder, Persephone—but [in India] The Retreat Is From The Source Of Life, The Treacherous Sun, And No Poetry Adorns It Because Disillusionment Cannot Be Beautiful. Men Yearn For Poetry Though They May Not Confess It; They Desire That Joy Shall Be Graceful And Sorrow August And Infinity Have A Form, And India Fails To Accommodate Them.

Death Destroys A Man, But The Idea Of Death Saves Him.

The Novelist, Unlike Many Of His Colleagues, Makes Up A Number Of Word-masses Roughly Describing Himself (roughly: Niceties Shallcome Later), Gives Them Names And Sex, Assigns Them Plausible Gestures, And Causes Them To Speak By The Use Of Inverted Commas, And Perhaps To Behave Consistently.

Mistrust All Enterprises That Require New Clothes.

Before The Civil War, Pottibakia Was A Normal Member Of The Comity Of Nations. She Erected Tariff Walls, Broke Treaties, Persecuted Minorities, Obstructed At Conferences Unless She Was Convinced There Was No Danger Of A Satisfactory Solution; Then She Strained Every Nerve In The Cause Of Peace.

The People I Respect Most Behave As If They Were Immortal And As If Society Was Eternal.

Beauty Ought To Look A Little Surprised: It Is The Emotion That Best Suits Her Face. The Beauty Who Does Not Look Surprised, Who Accepts Her Position As Her Due - She Reminds Us Too Much Of A Prima Donna.

One Doesn't Come To Italy For Niceness," Was The Retort; "one Comes For Life. Buon Giorno! Buon Giorno!

By The Side Of The Everlasting Why There Is A Yes--a Transitory Yes If You Like, But A Yes.

Room With A View

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.

As Long As Learning Is Connected With Earning, As Long As Certain Jobs Can Only Be Reached Through Exams, So Long Must We Take The Examination System Seriously. If Another Ladder To Employment Was Contrived, Much So-called Education Would Disappear, And No One Be A Penny The Stupider.

Art For Art's Sake? I Should Think So, And More So Than Ever At The Present Time. It Is The One Orderly Product Which Our Middling Race Has Produced. It Is The Cry Of A Thousand Sentinels, The Echo From A Thousand Labyrinths, It Is The Lighthouse Which Cannot Be Hidden. It Is The Best Evidence We Can Have Of Our Dignity.

Do We Find Happiness So Often That We Should Turn It Off The Box When It Happens To Sit There?

Finding Happiness

America Is Rather Like Life. You Can Usually Find In It What You Look For It Will Probably Be Interesting, And It Is Sure To Be Large.

Outside The Arch, Always There Seemed Another Arch. And Beyond The Remotest Echo, A Silence.

Ah, But You See, I Didn't Want To Be Fair.

For A Wonderful Physical Tie Binds The Parents To The Children; And - By Some Sad, Strange Irony - 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.

'a Friend,' He Repeated, Sentimental Suddenly. 'someone To Last Your Whole Life And You His. I Suppose Such A Thing Can't Really Happen Outside Sleep.'

In The Creative State A Man Is Taken Out Of Himself.

The People I Admire Most Are Those Who Are Sensitive And Want To Create Something Or Discover Something, And Do Not See Life In Terms Of Power.

One Has Two Duties - To Be Worried And Not To Be Worried.

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