E.M. Forster

Quotes

• “We reach in desperation beyond the fog, beyond the very stars, the voids of the universe are ransacked to justify the mo...”
• “In time, Mr Hall, one gets to recognize that sneer, that hardness, for fornication extends far beyond the actual deed. W...”
• “One minute. You know nothing about him. He probably has his own joys and interests- wife, children, snug little home. Th...”
• “A slow nature such as Maurice's appears insensitive, for it needs time even to feel. Its instinct is to assume that noth...”
• “The human mind is not a dignified organ, and I do not see how we can exercise it sincerely except through eclecticism. A...”
• “Had he lived some centuries ago, in the brightly coloured civilizations of the past, he would have had a definite status...”
• “For a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and—by some sad, strange irony—it does not bind us child...”
• “Food, the stoking-up process, the keeping alive of an individual flame, the process that begins before birth and is cont...”
• “There is only a certain amount of kindness in the world…just as there is a certain amount of light. We cast a shadow on ...”
• “Mr. Pembroke, watching his broad back, desired to bury a knife in it. The desire passed, partly because it was unclerica...”
• “They must live outside class, without relations or money; they must work and stick to each other till death. But England...”
• “When we were only acquaintances, you let me be myself, but now you're always protecting me... I won't be protected. I wi...”
• “Pity, if one can generalize, is at the bottom of woman. When men like us, it is for our better qualities, and however te...”
• “Most of the inhabitants of India do not mind how India is governed. Nor are the lower animals of England concerned about...”
• “He educated Maurice, or rather his spirit educated Maurice's spirit, for they themselves became equal. Neither thought "...”
• “He never even thought of tenderness and emotion; his considerations about Durham remained cold. Durham didn't dislike hi...”
• “This desire to govern a woman -- it lies very deep, and men and women must fight it together.... But I do love you surel...”
• “People turned out to be alive. Hitherto he had supposed that they were what he pretended to be - flat pieces of cardboar...”
• “He had a theory that musicians are incredibly complex, and know far less than other artists what they want and what they...”
• “The novelist defines the story with the following example: If you are told that the king died and then the queen died, t...”
• “I did not fear that I might tread upon a live rail and be killed. I feared something far more intangible-doing what was ...”
• “Margaret had often wondered at the disturbance that takes place in the world's waters when Love, who seems so tiny a peb...”
• “I was yours once till death if you cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now--I can't hang about whining for ever--an...”
• “The Waves is an extraordinary achievement ... It is trembling on the edge. A little less - and it would lose its poetry....”
• “I believed in a return to Nature once. But how can we return to Nature when we have never been with her? Today, I believ...”
• “Night and day, wind and storm, tide and earthquake, impeded man no longer. He had harnessed Leviathan. All the old liter...”
• “It is not difficult to stand above the conventions when we leave no hostages among them; men can always be more unconven...”
• “As for her hair, or rather hairs, they are too complicated to describe, but one system went down her back, lying in a th...”
• “You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried the other. "I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men ma...”
• “Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face.... The beauty who does not look sur...”
• “No; look out for the part where you think you have done with the goblins and they come back,' breathed Helen, as the mus...”
• “Conse­quently the Wolfenden recommendations will be indefinitely rejected, police prosecutions will continue and Clive o...”
• “Then she lay on her back and gazed at the cloudless sky. Mr. Beebe, whose opinion of her rose daily, whispered to his ni...”
• “Some reviews give pain. This is regrettable, but no author has the right to whine. He was not obliged to be an author. H...”
• “An acquaintance had become a lover, might become a husband, but would retain all that she had noted in the acquaintance;...”
• “All a child's life depends on the ideal it has of its parents. Destroy that and everything goes - morals, behavior, ever...”
• “Nothing ever happens to me, " she reflected..... An older person at such an hour and in such a place might think that su...”
• “... I since cricket match do long to talk with one of my arms around you, then place both arms round you and share with ...”
• “He had no racial feeling—not because he was superior to his brother civilians, but because he had matured in a different...”
• “... and someone he scarcely knew moved towards him and knelt beside him and whispered, 'Sir, was you calling out for me?...”
• “My father says that there is only one perfect view — the view of the sky straight over our heads, and that all these vie...”
• “Humility is a quality for which I have only a limited admiration. In many phases of life it is a great mistake and degen...”
• “…But so few of us think clearly about our own private incomes, and admit that independent thoughts are in nine cases out...”
• “Naked I came into the world, naked I shall go out of it! And a very good thing too, for it reminds me that I am naked un...”
• “He lived on, miserable and misunderstood, as before, and increasingly lonely. One cannot write those words too often: Ma...”
• “There stood a young man who had the figure of a Greek athlete and the face of an English one...Just where he began to be...”
• “He had awoken too late for happiness, but not for strength, and could feel an austere joy, as of a warrior who is homele...”
• “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 rea...”
• “Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but ...”
• “Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not...”