matildar

“When we were 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...Cecil you're that, for you may understand beautiful things, but you don't know how to use them; and you wrap yourself up in art and books and music, and would try to wrap me up. I won't be stifled, not by the most glorious music, for people are more glorious, and you hide them from me. That's why I break off my engagement.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“During this Lent term Maurice came out as a theologian. It was not humbug entirely. He believed that he believed, and felt genuine pain when anything he was accustomed to met criticism—the pain that masquerades among the middle classes as Faith. It was not Faith, being inactive. It gave him no support, no wider outlook. It didn’t exist till opposition touched it, when it ached like a useless nerve.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“A trick I often use, when I feel overwhelming shame or regret, or brokenness beyond repair, is to think of a line I especially love, or a poem that arrived like lightning, and remember that it wouldn't have come to me if anything in my life had happened differently. Not that way. Not in those words.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy

“I did not make it out, but this does. Art goes outside, even if we don't; it fills the whole air, though we cannot raise our voices.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy