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.
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.
Those who search for truth are too conscious of the maze to be hard on others...
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.
By the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes--a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.
Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.
She stopped and leant her elbows against the parapet of the embankment. He did likewise. There is at times a magic in identity of position; it is one of the things that have suggested to us eternal comradeship.
I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult.
Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?
If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting--both for us and for her.
It is so difficult - at least, I find it difficult - to understand people who speak the truth.
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.
Reverence is fatal to literature.
I have always found writing pleasant and don't understand what people mean by 'throes of creation.'
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.
Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.
She must be assured that it is not a criminal offense to love at first sight.
Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand.
I do like Christmas on the whole.... In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But it is clumsier every year.
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.
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.
They had nothing in common but the English language.
England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.
She loved him absolutely, perhaps for half an hour.
History develops, art stands still.
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