‘Why are pictures like this allowed?’ he suddenly cried. He had stopped in front of a colonial print in which the martyrdom of St Agatha was depicted… - E. M. Forster

My father says that there is only one perfect view — the view of the sky straight over our heads, and that all these views on earth are but bungled copies of it.

"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 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 sorrow.

There's enough sorrow in the world, isn't there, without trying to invent it.