E.M. Forster

After all, is not a real Hell better than a manufactured Heaven?

"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 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?"

He had always liked his friend's laugh, and at such a moment the soft rumble of it reassured him; it suggested happiness and security.

He had acted wrongly, and was still being punished- but wrongly because he had tried to get the best of both worlds.

They were his last words, because Maurice had disappeared thereabouts, leaving no trace of his presense except a little pile of the petals of the evening primrose, which mourned from the ground like an expiring fire.

He had begun rough and gay and somehow factitious, then his voice had died away into sadness as though truth had risen to the surface of the water and was unbearable.

"You care for me a little bit, I do think," he admitted, "but I can't hang all my life on a little bit. You don't. You hang yours on Anne. You don't worry whether your relation with her is platonic or not, you only know it's big enough to hang a life on."

Love was an emotion through which you occasionally enjoyed yourself. It could not do things.

He did not realize that this was the end, without twilight or compromise, that he should never cross Maurice's track again, nor speak to those who had seen him.

Lust is negligible when absent.

You could call your cousin a shit if you liked, but not a eunuch. Rotten style!

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.