E. M. Forster Quotes

Failure or success seems to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wriggling, of fighting with their star or against it, and in the whole universe the only really interesting movement is the wriggle.

Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.

Why can't we be friends now?" said the other, holding him affectionately. "It's what I want. It's what you want." But the horses didn't want it — they swerved apart: the earth didn't want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temple, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they emerged from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn't want it, they said in their hundred voices "No, not yet," and the sky said "No, not there.

This element of surprise or mystery — the detective element as it is sometimes rather emptily called — is of great importance in a plot. It occurs through a suspension of the time-sequence; a mystery is a pocket in time, and it occurs crudely, as in "Why did the queen die?" and more subtly in half-explained gestures and words, the true meaning of which only dawns pages ahead. Mystery is essential to a plot, and cannot be appreciated without intelligence.

You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.

I think - I think - I think how little they think what lies so near them.

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. . .

Sudden conversion ... is particularly attractive to the half-baked mind.

Money pads the edges of things.

The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

...the true spirit of gastronomic joylessness. Porridge fills the Englishman up, and prunes clear him out.

But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else.

She stopped and leant her elbows against the parapet of the embankment. He did likewise. There is at times a magic in identity of position; it is one of the things that have suggested to us eternal comradeship.

It is easy to sympathize at a distance,' said an old gentleman with a beard. 'I value more the kind word that is spoken close to my ear.

You told me once that we shall be judged by our intentions, not by our accomplishments. I thought it a grand remark. But we must intend to accomplish - not sit intending on a chair.

Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties. You will have noticed in daily life that when people are inquisitive they nearly always have bad memories and are usually stupid at bottom.

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.

Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind.

Tolerance is a very dull virtue. It is boring. Unlike love, it has always had a bad press. It is negative. It merely means putting up with people, being able to stand things.

Only connect!...Only connect the prose and the passion.

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

Give, do not lend; after death who will thank you?

The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken.

Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.

One grows accustomed to being praised, or being blamed, or being advised, but it is unusual to be understood.

It's not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts.

The idea that nations should love one another, or that business concerns or marketing boards should love one another, or that a man in Portugal should love a man in Peru of whom he has never heard -it is absurd, unreal, dangerous. The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much.

Chess is a forcing house where the fruits of character can ripen more fully than in life

It is so difficult - at least, I find it difficult - to understand people who speak the truth.

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.

I have said that each aspect of the novel demands a different quality of the reader. Well, the prophetic aspect demands two qualities: humility and the suspension of the sense of humour.

The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them.

I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden. It is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

By the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes--a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.

I really don't know what happens next -- one so seldom does.

It isn't possible to love and to part.

It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness.

Reverence is fatal to literature.

Their quarrel was no more surprising than are most quarrels — inevitable at the time, incredible afterwards.

If God could tell the story of the Universe, the Universe would become fictitious.

Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. We move between two darkness's.

The woman who can't influence her husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herself.

The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

When we were only acquaintances, you let me be myself, but now you're always protecting me... I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. Can't I be trusted to face the truth but I must get it second-hand through you? A woman's place!

I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's.

The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal. Both assumptions are false: both of them must be accepted as true if we are to go on eating and working and loving, and are to keep open a few breathing holes for the human spirit.