Maurice

You confuse what's important with what's impressive.

You do care a little for me, I know... but nothing to speak of, and you don't love me. I was yours once till death if you'd cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now... and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked, and attend to your own happiness.

I am an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort.

Did you ever dream you had a friend, Alec? Someone to last your whole life and you his. I suppose such a thing can’t really happen outside sleep.

A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense, Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.

After all, is not a real Hell better than a manufactured Heaven?

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

I swear from the bottom of my heart I want to be healed. I want to be like other men, not this outcast whom nobody wants.

There has been, is, and always will be every conceivable type of person.

Words deserted him immediately. He could only speak when he was not asked to.

I knew you read the Symposium in the vac," he said in a low voice. Maurice felt uneasy. "Then you understand - without me saying more - " "How do you mean?" Durham could not wait. People were all around them, but with eyes that had gone intensely blue he whispered, "I love you.

I think you’re beautiful, the only beautiful person I’ve ever seen. I love your voice and everything to do with you, down to your clothes or the room you are sitting in. I adore you.

There was something better in life than this rub­bish, if only he could get to it—love—nobility—big spaces where passion clasped peace, spaces no science could reach, but they existed for ever, full of woods some of them, and arched with majestic sky and a friend. . .

Because I say so little you think I don't feel. I care a lot.

He educated Maurice, or rather his spirit educated Maurice's spirit, for they themselves became equal. Neither thought "Am I led; am I leading?" Love had caught him out of triviality and Maurice out of bewilderment in order that two imperfect souls might touch perfection.

I was yours once 'till death if you'd cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now - I can't hang about whining forever - and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked, and attend to your own happiness?

Nothing's the same for anyone. That's why life's this Hell, if you do a thing you're damned, and if you don't you're damned . . . .

Why children?' he asked. 'Why always children? For love to end where it begins is far more beautiful, and Nature knows it.

When love flies it is remembered not as love but as something else. Blessed are the uneducated, who forget it entirely, and are never conscious of folly or pruriency in the past, of long aimless conversations.

You mean that a Frenchman could share with a friend and yet not go to prison?’ ‘Share? Do you mean unite? If both are of age and avoid public indecency, certainly.’ ‘Will the law ever be that in England?’ ‘I doubt it. England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.

They had never struggled, and only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.

He knew that loneliness was poisoning him, so that he grew viler as well as more unhappy.

... And now we shan't be parted no more, and that's finished.

Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.

He had awoken too late for happiness, but not for strength, and could feel an austere joy, as of a warrior who is homeless but stands fully armed.

They cared for no one, they were outside humanity, and death, had it come, would only have continued their pursuit of a retreating horizon.

He was obliged however to throw over Christianity. Those who base their conduct upon what they are rather than upon what they ought to be, always must throw it over in the end . . . .

When love flies it is remembered not as love but as something else.

It's miles worse for you than that; I'm in love with your gamekeeper.

A slow nature such as Maurice's appears insensitive, for it needs time even to feel.