For the dead, who seem to take away so much, really take with them nothing that is ours. The passion they have aroused lives after them, easy to tran… - E. M. Forster

For the dead, who seem to take away so much, really take with them nothing that is ours.

What had spoken to her in that scoured-out cavity of the granite? What dwelt in the first of the caves? Something very old and very small. Before time, it was before space also. Something snub-nosed, incapable of generosity — the undying worm itself. Since hearing its voice, she had not entertained one large thought, she was actually envious of Adela. All this fuss over a frightened girl! Nothing had happened, 'and if it had,' she found herself thinking with the cynicism of a withered priestess, 'if it had there are worse evils than love.' The unspeakable attempt presented itself to her as love: in a cave, in a church — Boum, it amounts to the same. Visions are supposed to entail profundity, but — Wait till you get one, dear reader! The abyss also may be petty, the serpent of eternity made of maggots; her constant thought was: 'Less attention should be paid to my future daughter-in-law and more to me, there is no sorrow like my sorrow,' although when the attention was paid she rejected it irritably.

He longed for smut, but heard little and contributed less, and his chief indecencies were solitary.

Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him.