Eleni > Eleni's Quotes

“All we can do is go around telling the truth.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“The Heart is a lonely hunter with only one desire! To find some lasting comfort in the arms of anothers fire...driven by a desperate hunger to the arms of a neon light, the heart is a lonely hunter when there's no sign of love in sight!”
― Carson McCullers

“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.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”
― E.M. Forster

“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”
― E.M. Forster, What I Believe and Other Essays

“I do like Christmas on the whole.... In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But it is clumsier every year.”
― E.M. Forster

“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.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“This desire to govern a woman—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. "Yes—really in a better way. I want you to have your own thoughts even when I hold you in my arms.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand.”
― E.M. Forster

“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.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“A humanist has four leading characteristics - curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.”
― E.M. Forster

“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.”
― E. M. Forster

“She loved him absolutely, perhaps for half an hour.”
― EM Forster

“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.”
― E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread

“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.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“I taught him, 'he quavered, "to trust in love. I said:'when love comes, that is reality.' I said: 'Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand.”
― E. M. Forster, A Room With a View

“Passion should believe itself irresistible. It should forget civility and consideration and all the other curses of a refined nature. Above all, it should never ask for leave where there is a right of way.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“She could not explain in so many words, but she felt that those who prepare for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.”
― E. M. Forster, Howard's End

“It is so difficult - at least, I find it difficult - to understand people who speak the truth.”
― E. M. Forster, A Room with a View

“Did you ever dream you had a friend, Alec? Someone to last your whole life and you his. I suppose such a thing can’t really happen outside sleep.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“You confuse what's important with what's impressive.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“Though life is very glorious, it is difficult.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View and Howards End

“The need to go astray, to be destroyed, is an extremely private, distant, passionate, turbulent truth.”
― Georges Bataille

“Nothing is more necessary or stronger in us than rebellion.”
― Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge

“The sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space.”
― Georges Bataille

“To others, the universe seems decent because decent people have welded eyes. That is why they fear lewdness. They are never frightened by the crowing of a rooster or when strolling under a starry heaven. In general, people savor the "pleasures of the flesh" only on the condition that they may be insipid.”
― Georges Bataille

“To others, the universe seems decent because decent people have gelded eyes. That is why they fear lewdness. They are never frightened by the crowing of a rooster or when strolling under a starry heaven. In general, people savor the "pleasures of the flesh" only on condition that they be insipid.
But as of then, no doubt existed for me: I did not care for what is known as "pleasures of the flesh" because they really are insipid; I cared only for what is classified as "dirty." On the other hand, I was not even satisfied with the usual debauchery, because the only thing it dirties is debauchery itself, while, in some way or other, anything sublime and perfectly pure is left intact by it. My kind of debauchery soils not only my body and my thoughts, but also anything I may conceive in its course, that is to say, the vast starry universe, which merely serves as a backdrop.”
― Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye

“The owl flies, in the moonlight, over a field where the wounded cry out.

Like the owl, I fly in the night over my own misfortune.”
― Georges Bataille, The Impossible: A Story of Rats followed by Dianus and by The Oresteia