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 t… - E. M. Forster

"I only know what it is that's wrong with him; not why it is."
And what is it?" asked Lucy fearfully, expecting some harrowing tale.
The old trouble; things won't fit."
What things?"
The things of the universe. It's quite true. They don't."
Oh Mr. Emerson, whatever do you mean?"
In his ordinary voice, so that she scarcely realized he was quoting poetry, he said:

"'From far, from eve and morning,
And yon twelve-winded sky,
The stuff of life to knit me
Blew hither: here am I."

George and I both know this, but why does it distress him? We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all of life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us rather love one another, and work and rejoice. I don't believe in this world of sorrow."

Every little trifle, for some reason, does seem incalculably important today, and when you say of a thing that 'nothing hangs on it,' it sounds like blasphemy. There's never any knowing — (how am I to put it?) — which of our actions, which of our idlenesses won't have things hanging on it for ever.

"Talk away. If you bore us, we have books."
With this invitation Rickie began to relate his history. The reader who has no book will be obliged to listen to it.