I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I'd like to be. - E. M. Forster

All this fame and money, which have so thrilled me when they came to others, leave me cold when they come to me. I am not an ascetic, but I don't know what to do with them, and my daily life has never been so trying, and there is no one to fill it emotionally.

You, who have just crossed the Roof of the World, will not want to hear an account of the little hills that I saw — low, colorless hills. But to me they were living and the turf that covered them was a skin, under which their muscles rippled, and I felt that those hills had called with incalculable force to men in the past, and that men had loved them. Now they sleep — perhaps for ever. They commune with humanity in dreams.

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.