The Longest Journey QUOTES

2 " Oh, poor, poor fellow!' said Mrs. Elliot with a remorse that was sincere, though her congratulations would not have been. "

― E.M. Forster , The Longest Journey

4 " The bully and the victim never quite forget their first relations. "

― E.M. Forster , The Longest Journey

6 " He had shown her all the workings of his soul, mistaking this for love. "

― E.M. Forster , The Longest Journey

8 " Yet complicated people were getting wet - not only the shepherds. For instance, the piano-tuner was sopping. So was the vicar's wife. So were the lieutenant and the peevish damsels in his Battlesden car. Gallantry, charity, and art pursued their various missions, perspiring and muddy, while out on the slopes beyond them stood the eternal man and the eternal dog, guarding eternal sheep until the world is vegetarian. "

― E.M. Forster , The Longest Journey

10 " Athletes, he believed, were simple, straightforward people, cruel and brutal if you like, but never petty. They knocked you down and hurt you, and then went on their way rejoicing. "

― E.M. Forster , The Longest Journey

12 " He never retorted that the artist is not a bricklayer at all, but a horseman whose business it is to catch Pegasus at once, not to practise for him by mounting tamer colts. This is hard, hot and generally ungraceful work, but it is not drudgery. For drudgery is not art, and cannot lead to it. "

― E.M. Forster , The Longest Journey

14 " He was thinking of the irony of friendship—so strong it is, and so fragile. We fly together, like straws in an eddy, to part in the open stream. "

― E.M. Forster , The Longest Journey

16 " Something had changed. He had journeyed—as on rare occasions a man must—till he stood behind right and wrong. On the banks of the grey torrent of life, love is the only flower. "

― E.M. Forster , The Longest Journey

18 " The book was Shelley, and it opened at a passage that he had cherished greatly two years before, and marked as “very good.”

“I never was attached to that great sect,
Whose doctrine is, that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion, though it is in the code
Of modern morals, and the beaten road
Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread,
Who travel to their home among the dead
By the broad highway of the world, and so
With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,
The dreariest and the longest journey go. "

― E.M. Forster , The Longest Journey

20 " Mr. Ansell was not merely a man of some education; he had what no education can bring — the power of detecting what is important. Like many fathers, he had spared no expense over his boy, — he had borrowed money to start him at a rapacious and fashionable private school; he had sent him to tutors; he had sent him to Cambridge. But he knew that all this was not the important thing. The important thing was freedom. "

― E.M. Forster , The Longest Journey