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There Is Fascism, Leading Only Into The Blackness Which It Has Chosen As Its Symbol, Into Smartness And Yapping Out Of Orders, And Self-righteous Brutality, Into Social As Well As International War. It Means Change Without Hope. Our Immediate Duty - In That Tinkering Which Is The Only Useful Form Of Action In Our Leaky Old Tub - Our Immediate Duty Is To Stop It.

-E. M. Forster

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There Is Fascism, Leading

E. M. Forster

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There Is Fascism, Leading Only Into The Blackness Which It Has Chosen As Its Symbol, Into Smartness And Yapping Out Of Orders, And Self-righteous Brutality, Into Social As Well As International War. It Means Change Without Hope. Our Immediate Duty - In That Tinkering Which Is The Only Useful Form Of Action In Our Leaky Old Tub - Our Immediate Duty Is To Stop It.

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I Am An Unspeakable Of The Oscar Wilde Sort.

It Is Easy To Sympathize At A Distance,' Said An Old Gentleman With A Beard. 'i Value More The Kind Word That Is Spoken Close To My Ear.

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

The Germans Are Called Brutal, The Spanish Cruel, The Americans Superficial, And So On; But We Are Perfide Albion, The Island Of Hypocrites, The People Who Have Built Up An Empire With A Bible In One Hand, A Pistol In The Other, And Financial Concessions In Both Pockets. Is The Charge True? I Think It Is.

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.

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

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.

To Trust People Is A Luxury In Which Only The Wealthy Can Indulge; The Poor Cannot Afford It.

God Is Not Love In The East. He Is Power, Although Mercy May Temper It.

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

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.

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.

Love Is Always Being Given Where It Is Not Required.

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

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

Be Soft, Even If You Stand To Get Squashed.

The Sadness Of The Incomplete, The Sadness That Is Often Life, But Should Never Be Art.

I Distrust Great Men... I Believe In Aristocracy, Though... Its Members Are To Be Found In All Nations And Classes, And All Through The Ages, And There Is A Secret Understanding Between Them When They Meet... They Are Sensitive For Others As Well As For Themselves, They Are Considerate Without Being Fussy, Their Pluck Is Not Swankiness But The Power To Endure, And They Can Take A Joke.

One Marvels Why The Middle Classes Still Insist On So Much Discomfort For Their Children At Such Expense To Themselves.

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.

I Am A Jane Austenite, And Therefore Slightly Imbecile About Jane Austen. My Fatuous Expression, And Airs Of Personal Immunity-how Ill They Sit On The Face, Say,of A Stevensonian! But Jane Austen Is So Different. She Is My Favourite Author! I Read And Reread, The Mouth Open And The Mind Closed. Shut Up In Measureless Content, I Greet Her By The Name Of Most Kind Hostess, While Criticism Slumbers.

For You Cannot Have Gentility Without Paying For It.

The Middle Age Of Buggers Is Not To Be Contemplated Without Horror.

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

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

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

Money Pads The Edges Of Things.

One Minute. You Know Nothing About Him. He Probably Has His Own Joys And Interests- Wife, Children, Snug Little Home. That's Where We Practical Fellows'- He Smiled-'are More Tolerant Than You Intellectuals. We Live And Let Live, And Assume That Things Are Jogging On Fairly Well Elsewhere, And That The Ordinary Plain Man May Be Trusted To Look After His Own Affairs.

Those Who Search For Truth Are Too Conscious Of The Maze To Be Hard On Others...

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

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

Democracies Have

I Have No Mystic Faith In The People. I Have In The Individual.

This Solitude Opressed Her; She Was Accustomed To Have Her Thoughts Confirmed By Others Or, At All Events, Contradicted; It Was Too Dreadful Not To Know Whether She Was Thinking Right Or Wrong.

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.

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. . .

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.

Don't Go Fighting Against The Spring.

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.

There Is Fascism, Leading Only Into The Blackness Which It Has Chosen As Its Symbol, Into Smartness And Yapping Out Of Orders, And Self-righteous Brutality, Into Social As Well As International War. It Means Change Without Hope. Our Immediate Duty - In That Tinkering Which Is The Only Useful Form Of Action In Our Leaky Old Tub - Our Immediate Duty Is To Stop It.

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.

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

In The Light Of Her Son's Comment She Reconsidered The Scene At The Mosque, To See Whose Impression Was Correct. Yes It Could Be Worked Into Quite An Unpleasant Scene. The Doctor Had Begun By Bullying Her, Had Said Mrs Callendar Was Nice, And Then - Finding The Ground Safe - Had Changed; He Had Alternately Whined Over His Grievances And Patronized Her, Had Run A Dozen Ways In A Single Sentence, Had Been Unreliable, Inquisitive, Vain. Yes, It Was All True, But How False As A Summary Of The Man; The Essential Life Of Him Had Been Slain.

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

Happiness In The Ordinary Sense Is Not What One Needs In Life, Though One Is Right To Aim At It. The True Satisfaction Is To Come Through, And See Those Whom One Lives Come Through.

Life - No, I've Nothing To Teach You About It For The Moment. May Be Writing About It Another Week.

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

It Is My Fate And Perhaps My Temperament To Sign Agreements With Fools.

Pathos, Piety, Courage, They Exist, But Are Identical, And So Is Filth. Everything Exists, Nothing Has Value.

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.

Faith, To My Mind, Is A Stiffening Process, A Sort Of Mental Starch, Which Ought To Be Applied As Sparingly As Possible. I Dislike The Stuff. I Do Not Believe In It, For Its Own Sake, At All... My Lawgivers Are Erasmus And Montaigne, Not Moses And St Paul. My Temple Stands Not Upon Mount Moriah But In The Elysian Field Where Even The Immoral Are Admitted. My Motto Is 'lord, I Disbelieve - Help Thou My Unbelief.

Lord I Disbelieve - Help Thou My Unbelief.

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.

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.

He Was Obliged However To Throw Over Christianity. Those Who Base Their Conduct Upon What They Are Rather Than Upon What They Ought To Be, Always Must Throw It Over In The End . . . .

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.

I Know By Experience That The Poets Are Right: Love Is Eternal.

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.

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

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.

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

All Men Are Equal — All Men, That Is To Say, Who Possess Umbrellas.

Only Connect The Prose And The Passion, And Both Will Be Exalted, And Human Love Will Be Seen At Its Highest. Live In Fragments No Longer

[...] It Is Right To Be Kind And Even Sacrifice Ourselves To People Who Need Kindness And Lie In Our Way - Otherwise, Besides Failing To Help Them, We Run Into The Aridity Of Self-development. To Seek For Recipients Of One's Goodness, To Play The Potted Jesus Leads To The Contray The Christian Danger.

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

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

In The Creative State A Man Is Taken Out Of Himself. He Lets Down As It Were A Bucket Into His Subconscious, And Draws Up Something Which Is Normally Beyond His Reach. He Mixes This Thing With His Normal Experiences And Out Of The Mixture He Makes A Work Of Art.

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.

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.

As Her Time In Florence Drew To A Close She Was Only At Ease Amongst Those To Whom She Felt Indifferent.

The Book [ A Passage To India ] Shows Signs Of Fatigue And Disillusionment; But It Has Chapters Of Clear And Triumphant Beauty, And Above All It Makes Us Wonder, What Will He Write Next?

Human Beings Have Their Great Chance In The Novel.

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

Science Is Better Than Sympathy, If Only It Is Science.

English Literature Is A Flying Fish.

Our Easiest Approach To A Definition Of Any Aspect Of Fiction Is Always By Considering The Sort Of Demand It Makes On The Reader. Curiosity For The Story, Human Feelings And A Sense Of Value For The Characters, Intelligence And Memory For The Plot. What Does Fantasy Ask Of Us? It Asks Us To Pay Something Extra.

There Is Much Good Luck In The World, But It Is Luck. We Are None Of Us Safe. We Are Children, Playing Or Quarrelling On The Line.

The Woman Who Can't Influence Her Husband To Vote The Way She Wants Ought To Be Ashamed Of Herself.

The Tragedy Of Preparedness Has Scarcely Been Handled, Save By The Greeks. Life Is Indeed Dangerous, But Not In The Way Morality Would Have Us Believe. It Is Indeed Unmanageable, But The Essence Of It Is Not A Battle. It Is Unmanageable Because It Is A Romance, And Its Essence Is Romantic Beauty.

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

One Can Run Away From Women, Turn Them Out, Or Give In To Them. No Fourth Course.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

It Was Not That Ladies Were Inferior To Men; It Was That They Were Different. Their Mission Was To Inspire Others To Achievement Rather Than To Achieve Themselves. Indirectly, By Means Of Tact And A Spotless Name, A Lady Could Accomplish Much. But If She Rushed Into The Fray Herself She Would Be First Censured, Then Despised, And Finally Ignored.

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

Pity Wraps The Student Of The Past In An Ambrosial Cloud, And Washes His Limbs With Eternal Youth.

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

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

Riposte Of "that Old Lady In The Anecdote Who Was Accused By Her Nieces Of Being Illogical," Logic! Good Gracious! What Rubbish! How Can I Tell What I Think Till I See What I Say?

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

In Time, Mr Hall, One Gets To Recognize That Sneer, That Hardness, For Fornication Extends Far Beyond The Actual Deed. Were It A Deed Only, I For One Would Not Hold It Anathema. But When The Nations Went A Whoring They Invariably Ended By Denying God, I Think, And Until All Sexual Irregularities And Not Some Of Them Are Penal The Church Will Never Reconquer England.

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

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

Only A Struggle Twists Sentimentality And Lust Together Into Love.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The Strong Are So Stupid.

This Element Of Surprise Or Mystery — The Detective Element As It Is Sometimes Rather Emptily Called — Is Of Great Importance In A Plot. It Occurs Through A Suspension Of The Time-sequence; A Mystery Is A Pocket In Time, And It Occurs Crudely, As In "why Did The Queen Die?" And More Subtly In Half-explained Gestures And Words, The True Meaning Of Which Only Dawns Pages Ahead. Mystery Is Essential To A Plot, And Cannot Be Appreciated Without Intelligence.

People In A Novel Can Be Understood Completely By The Reader, If The Novelist Can Be Understood Completely By The Reader, If The Novelist Wishes; Their Inner As Well As Their Outer Life Can Be Exposed.

Why Children?' He Asked. 'why Always Children? For Love To End Where It Begins Is Far More Beautiful, And Nature Knows It.

A Mirror Does Not Develop Because An Historical Pageant Passes In Front Of It. It Only Develops When It Gets A Fresh Coat Of Quicksilver In Other Words, When It Acquires New Sensitiveness; And The Novel's Success Lies In Its Own Sensitiveness, Not In The Success Of Its Subject Matter.

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

Only Connect!...only Connect The Prose And The Passion.

There's Nothing Like A Debate To Teach One Quickness. I Often Wish I Had Gone In For Them When I Was A Youngster. It Would Have Helped Me No End.

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.

... There Are Shadows Because There Are Hills.

Room With A View

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.

How Few Writers Can Prostitute All Their Powers!

What Is Wonderful About Great Literature Is That It Transforms The Man Who Reads It Towards The Condition Of The Man Who Wrote.

I Do Like Christmas On The Whole.... In Its Clumsy Way, It Does Approach Peace And Goodwill. But It Is Clumsier Every Year.

Only People Who Have Been Allowed To Practise Freedom Can Have The Grown-up Look In Their Eyes.

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

Room With A View

My Conviction Gains Infinitely The Moment Another Soul Will Believe In It.

Mistrust All Enterprises That Require New Clothes.

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony Is The Most Sublime Noise That Has Ever Penetrated Into The Ear Of Man.

Freedom Does Not Guarantee Masterpieces.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Revealing Something

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 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.

It Is Devilish Difficult To Criticise Society & Also Create Human Beings.

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

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

I Never Could Get On With Representative Individuals But People Who Existed On Their Own Account And With Whom It Might Therefore Be Possible To Be Friends.

If God Could Tell The Story Of The Universe, The Universe Would Become Fictitious.

I Seem Fated To Pass Through The World Without Colliding With It Or Moving It — And I'm Sure I Can't Tell You Whether The Fate's Good Or Evil. I Don't Die — I Don't Fall In Love. And If Other People Die Or Fall In Love They Always Do It When I'm Just Not There.

Falling In Love

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

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.

I'd Far Rather Leave A Thought Behind Me Than A Child. Other People Can Have Children.

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.

Let Yourself Go. Pull Out From The Depths Those Thoughts That You Do Not Understand, And Spread Them Out In The Sunlight And Know The Meaning Of Them.

Roger Fry Is Painting Me. It Is Too Like Me At Present, But He Is Confident He Will Be Able To Alter That. Post-impressionism Is At Present Confined To My Lower Lip... And To My Chin.

Tolerance Is Just A Makeshift, Suitable For An Overcrowded And Overheated Planet. It Carries On When Love Gives Out, And Love Generally Gives Out As Soon As We Move Away From Our Home And Our Friends.

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

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

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.

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.

Hardship Is Vanishing, But So Is Style, And The Two Are More Closely Connected Than The Present Generation Supposes.

I Am Certainly An Ought And Not A Must.

The Final Test For A Novel Will Be Our Affection For It, As It Is The Test Of Our Friends, And Of Anything Else Which We Cannot Define.

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.

It Is The Starved Imagination, Not The Well Nourished, That Is Afraid.

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.

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.

'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 Novel We Can Know People Perfectly, And, Apart From The General Pleasure Of Reading, We Can Find Here A Compensation For Their Dimness In Life.

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.

Though Life Is Very Glorious, It Is Difficult.

There Is An Aristocracy Of The Sensitive. They Represent The True Human Tradition Of Permanent Victory Over Cruelty And Chaos.

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

“it Is Fate That I Am Here,” Persisted George. “but You Can Call It Italy If It Makes You Less Unhappy.”

Room With A View

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

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

Railway Termini Are Our Gates To The Glorious And The Unknown

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 Doesn't Want You To Be Real, And To Think And To Live. He Doesn't Love You. But I Love You. I Want You To Have Your Own Thoughts And Ideas And Feelings, Even When I Hold You In My Arms.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

Some Leave Our Life With Tears, Others With An Insane Frigidity; Mrs. Wilcox Had Taken The Middle Course, Which Only Rarer Natures Can Pursue. She Had Kept Proportion. She Had Told A Little Of Her Grim Secret To Her Friends, But Not Too Much; She Had Shut Up Her Heart--almost, But Not Entirely. 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.

Growing Old Is An Emotion Which Comes Over Us At Almost Any Age; I Had It Myself Between The Ages Of 25 And 30.

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

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

The More Highly Public Life Is Organized The Lower Does Its Morality Sink.

A Sentence Begins Quite Simply, Then It Undulates And Expands, Parentheses Intervene Like Quick-set Hedges, The Flowers Of Comparison Bloom, And Three Fields Off, Like A Wounded Partridge, Crouches The Principal Verb, Making One Wonder As One Picks It Up, Poor Little Thing, Whether After All It Was Worth Such A Tramp, So Many Guns, And Such Expensive Dogs, And What, After All, Is Its Relation To The Main Subject, Potted So Gaily Half A Page Back, And Proving Finally To Have Been In The Accusative Case.

It Is Now Only In Letters I Write What I Feel: Not In Literature Any More, And I Seldom Say It, Because I Keep Trying To Be Amusing.

The Armour Of Falsehood Is Subtly Wrought Out Of Darkness, And Hides A Man Not Only From Others, But From His Own Soul.

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

Have You Ever Noticed That There Are People Who Do Things Which Are Most Indelicate, And Yet At The Same Time - Beautiful?

Room With A View

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

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.

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.

But It Struck Him That People Are Not Really Dead Until They Are Felt To Be Dead. As Long As There Is Some Misunderstanding About Them, They Possess A Sort Of Immortality.

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

It Is The Function Of The Novelist To Reveal The Hidden Life At Its Source: To Tell Us More About Queen Victoria Than Could Be Known, And Thus To Produce A Character Who Is Not The Queen Victoria Of History.

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.

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.

All That Is Observable In A Man-that Is To Say His Actions And Such Of His Spiritual Existence As Can Be Deduced From His Actions-falls Into The Domain Of History.

Are Not Beauty And Delicacy The Same?

Room With A View

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

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