Take an old man's word; there's nothing worse than a muddle in all the world. It is easy to face Death and Fate, and the things that sound so dreadfu… - E. M. Forster

Looking back on the past six months, Margaret realized the chaotic nature of our daily life, and its difference from the orderly sequence that has been fabricated by historians. Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes. The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken.

For the barrier of language is sometimes a blessed barrier, which only lets pass what is good. Or — to put the thing less cynically — we may be better in new clean words, which have never been tainted by our pettiness or vice. Phillip, at all events, lived more graciously in Italian, the very phrases of which entice one to be happy and kind.

Beautiful conventions received them — while beyond the barrier Maurice wandered, the wrong words on his lips, the wrong desires in his heart, and his arms full of air.