Quotes from E. M. Forster

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.

He had shown her all the workings of his soul, mistaking this for love.

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

He doesn't want you to be real, and to think and to live. He doesn't love you. But I love you. I want you to have your own thoughts and ideas and feelings, even when I hold you in my arms.

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.

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

Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.

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

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

Chicago - a facade of skyscrapers facing a lake and behind the facade every type of dubiousness.

In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences and out of the mixture he makes a work of art.

An efficiency-regime cannot be run without a few heroes stuck about it to carry off the dullness - much as plums have to be put into a bad pudding to make it palatable.

It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals, and perhaps this is why history is so attractive to the more timid among us.

There is much good luck in the world, but it is luck. We are none of us safe. We are children, playing or quarrelling on the line.

Failure and success seem 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 this wriggle.

How can I know what I think till I see what I say?

I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I'd like to be.

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

Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration.

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

I'm a holy man minus the holiness.

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.

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.

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