When we were only 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 … - E. M. Forster

I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralysed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops — but not on our lines. The Machine proceeds — but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die.

We reach in desperation beyond the fog, beyond the very stars, the voids of the universe are ransacked to justify the monster, and stamped with a human face. London is religions opportunity — not the decorous religion of theologians, but an anthropomorphic, crude. Yes, the continuous flow would be tolerable if a man of our own sort — not anyone pompous or tearful — were caring for us up in the sky.