'Inexperience,' repeated Margaret, in  serious yet buoyant tones. 'Of course, I have everything to learn -- absolutely everything -- just as much as Helen. Life's very difficult and full of surprises. At all events, I've got as far as that. To be humble and kind, to go straight ahead, to love people rather than pity them, to remember the submerged -- well, one can't do all these things at once, worse luck, because they're so contradictory. It's then that proportion comes in -- to live by proportion. Don't begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. ...

E.M. Forster, "Howards End" 

Several days passed.

Was Mrs Wilcox one of the unsatisfactory people - there are many of them - who dangle intimacy and then withdraw it? They evoke our interests and affections, and keep the life of the spirit dawdling round them. Then they withdraw. When physical passion is involved, there is a definite name for such behaviour -- flirting -- and if carried far enough it is punishable by law. But no law -- not public opinion even -- punishes those who coquette with friendship, though the dull ache that they inflict, the sense of misdirected effort and exhaustion, may be as intolerable.

- E.M. Forster, "Howards End" 

Isto é tão verdade. Acho que todos nós já nos vimos numa situação parecida: conhecemos alguém que será um amigo fabuloso, alguém que a princípio está sempre lá e nos alicia mas que, de repente, desaparece. E eu não sou santa nenhuma. Tenho a certeza que inconscientemente já o fiz. É daqueles comportamentos meus que não consigo explicar, mas este não é um blogue pessoal.

“He says, you have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind about history and everything else but you can’t make up an empty mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind. You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.”

—	Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes (via)

de  For Whom The Bell Tolls, de Ernest Hemingway

Source

"I inflict all this on you because you once said that life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama,..."

                            E.M. Forster, "Howards End"