Maurice

by E.M. Forster

but there were so many boys of his type—they formed the backbone of the school and we cannot notice each vertebra.

He hadn’t known it could be mentioned, and when Durham did so in the middle of the sunlit court a breath of liberty touched him.

The idealism and the brutality that ran through boyhood had joined at last, and twined into love.

Then they wrote every day and for all their care created new images in each other’s hearts. Letters distort even more quickly than silence.

a particular harmony of body and soul that I don’t think women have even guessed.

And their love scene drew out, having the inestimable gain of a new language. No tradition overawed the boys. No convention settled what was poetic, what absurd. They were concerned with a passion that few English minds have admitted, and so created untrammelled. Something of exquisite beauty arose in the mind of each at last, something unforgettable and eternal, but built of the humblest scraps of speech and from the simplest emotions.

If Maurice made love it was Clive who preserved it, and caused its rivers to water the garden. He could not bear that one drop should be wasted, either in bitterness or in sentimentality,

The feeling that can impel a gentleman towards a person of lower class stands self-condemned.

Between men it is inexcusable, between man and woman it may be practised since nature and society approve, but never discussed nor vaunted.

“It comes to this then: there always have been people like me and always will be, and generally they have been persecuted.”

only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.

Maurice wanted the same, what’s pleasanter, but the oncoming future distracted him, the gathering light made cosiness unreal. Something had to be said and settled. O for the night that was ending, for the sleep and the wakefulness, the toughness and tenderness mixed, the sweet temper, the safety in darkness. Would such a night ever return?

the lips so close now that it was scarcely speech.