E. M. Forster Quotes

Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?

Hope, politeness, the blowing of a nose, the squeak of a boot, all produce "boum.

Are not beauty and delicacy the same?

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. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed.

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

I can only do what's easy. I can only entice and be enticed. I can't, and won't, attempt difficult relations. If I marry it will either be a man who's strong enough to boss me or whom I'm strong enough to boss. So I shan't ever marry, for there aren't such men. And Heaven help any one whom I do marry, for I shall certainly run away from him before you can say 'Jack Robinson.

But the body is deeper than the soul and its secrets inscrutable.

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

I never could get on with representative individuals but people who existed on their own account and with whom it might therefore be possible to be friends.

If we act the truth the people who really love us are sure to come back to us in the long run

All that is observable in a man-that is to say his actions and such of his spiritual existence as can be deduced from his actions-falls into the domain of history.

It is obvious enough for the reader to conclude, "She loves young Emerson." A reader in Lucy's place would not find it obvious. Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice, and we welcome "nerves" or any other shibboleth that will cloak our personal desire. She loved Cecil; George made her nervous; will the reader explain to her that the phrases should have been reversed?

Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer

Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.

Roger Fry is painting me. It is too like me at present, but he is confident he will be able to alter that. Post-Impressionism is at present confined to my lower lip... and to my chin.

To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.

A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.

Without form, the sensitiveness vanishes.

In the creative state a man is taken out of himself.

The people I admire most are those who are sensitive and want to create something or discover something, and do not see life in terms of power.

The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.

There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

My conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it.

Then she lay on her back and gazed at the cloudless sky. Mr. Beebe, whose opinion of her rose daily, whispered to his niece that that was the proper way to behave if any little thing went wrong.

This element of surprise or mystery the detective element as it is sometimes rather emptily called is of great importance in a plot.

Human beings have their great chance in the novel.

Men were not gods after all, but as human and as clumsy as girls.

Science explained people, but could not understand them. After long centuries among the bones and muscles it might be advancing to knowledge of the nerves, but this would never give understanding

I cannot help thinking that there is something to admire in everyone, even if you do not approve of them.

In Europe life retreats out of the cold, and exquisite fireside myths have resulted—Balder, Persephone—but [in India] the retreat is from the source of life, the treacherous sun, and no poetry adorns it because disillusionment cannot be beautiful. Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form, and India fails to accommodate them.

England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature--for the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still, for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk.

The bully and his victim never quite forget their first relations.

The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.

An acquaintance had become a lover, might become a husband, but would retain all that she had noted in the acquaintance; and love must confirm an old relation rather than reveal a new one.

A novel is based on evidence, + or -x, the unknown quantity being the temperament of the novelist, and the unknown quantity always modifies the effect of the evidence, and sometimes transforms it entirely.

Life - No, I've nothing to teach you about it for the moment. May be writing about it another week.

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.

Sex begins before adolescence, and survives sterility; it is indeed coeval with our lives, although at the mating age its effects are more obvious to Society.

No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour.

God is not Love in the East. He is Power, although Mercy may temper it.

The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.

If only the sense of actuality can be lulled-and it sleeps for ever in most historians-there is no passion that cannot be gratified in the past.

Ah, but you see, I didn't want to be fair.

The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.

Some leave our life with tears, others with an insane frigidity; Mrs. Wilcox had taken the middle course, which only rarer natures can pursue. She had kept proportion. She had told a little of her grim secret to her friends, but not too much; she had shut up her heart--almost, but not entirely. It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die--neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave.

In time, Mr Hall, one gets to recognize that sneer, that hardness, for fornication extends far beyond the actual deed. Were it a deed only, I for one would not hold it anathema. But when the nations went a whoring they invariably ended by denying God, I think, and until all sexual irregularities and not some of them are penal the Church will never reconquer England.

A facade of skyscrapers facing a lake and behind the facade, every type of dubiousness.