E. M. Forster Quotes

It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.

Of course he despised the world as a whole; every thoughtful man should; it is almost a test of refinement.

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

We may divide characters into flat and round.

I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult.

One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.

Suspense: the only literary tool that has any effect upon tyrants and savages.

Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another.

You want to love everyone equally, and that's worse than impossible--it's wrong.

It is the starved imagination, not the well nourished, that is afraid.

Don't be mysterious; there isn't the time.

Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return.

Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and of the recipient.

Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.

If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting--both for us and for her.

The so called white races are really pinko-grey.

I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.

England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.

The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.

The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises it is flat. Flat characters ... in their purest form ... are constructed round a single idea or quality; when there is more than one factor to them, we get the beginning of the curve toward the round. The really flat character can be experessed in one sentence such as, "I will never desert Mr Micawber." There is Mrs Micawber - she says she won't desert Mr Micawber; she doesn't, and there she is.

As her time in Florence drew to a close she was only at ease amongst those to whom she felt indifferent.

George had turned at the sound of her arrival. For a moment he contemplated her, as one who had fallen out of heaven. He saw radiant joy in her face, he saw the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves. The bushes above them closed. He stepped quickly forward and kissed her. Before she could speak, almost before she could feel, a voice called 'Lucy! Lucy! Lucy!' The silence of life had been broken by Miss Bartlett, who stood brown against the view.

Romance only dies with life. No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of us. But there is a spurious sentiment which cannot resist the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque. A touch will loosen it, and the sooner it goes from us the better.

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.

People in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed.

We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.

Excuse my mistakes, realize my limitations. Life is not easy as we know it on the earth.

Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work.

One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

I'm a holy man minus the holiness.

I do like Christmas on the whole.... In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But it is clumsier every year.

When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.

To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it.

Growing old is an emotion which comes over us at almost any age; I had it myself between the ages of 25 and 30.

Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.

Towns are after all excrescences, grey fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.

We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.

Man has to pick up the use of his functions as he goes along- especially the function of Love.

Man can learn everything if he will but try.

I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.

The Germans are called brutal, the Spanish cruel, the Americans superficial, and so on; but we are perfide Albion, the island of hypocrites, the people who have built up an Empire with a Bible in one hand, a pistol in the other, and financial concessions in both pockets. Is the charge true? I think it is.

He built up a situation that was far enough from the truth. It never occurred to him that Helen was to blame. He forgot the intensity of their talk, the charm that had been lent him by sincerity, the magic of Oniton under darkness and of the whispering river. Helen loved the absolute. Leonard had been ruined absolutely, and had appeared to her as a man apart, isolated from the world. A real man, who cared for adventure and beauty, who desired to live decently and pay his way, who could have travelled more gloriously through life than the Juggernaut car that was crushing him.

For it is a serious thing to have been watched. We all radiate something curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone.

Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.

Love is always being given where it is not required.

The emotions may be endless. The more we express them, the more we may have to express.

Freedom does not guarantee masterpieces.