Quotes from E. M. Forster

If a man cannot lead up to passion, he can at all events lead down from it

He told us another day that views are really crowds--crowds of trees and houses and hills--and are bound to resemble each other, like human crowds--and that the power they have over us is sometimes supernatural, for the same reason. […] For a crowd is more than the people who make it up. Something gets added to it--no one knows how--just as something has got added to those hills.

I am the means and not the end. I am the food and not the life. Stand by yourself, as that boy has stood. I cannot save you. For poetry is a spirit; and they that would worship it must worship in spirit and in truth.

A story tells us what happened, but a plot tells us why

Io amo la Morte... non per morbosità, ma perché spiega. Mi mostra la vanità del Denaro. Morte e Denaro sono gli eterni nemici. Non Morte e Vita. Non importa quello che c'è dietro la Morte, signor Bast, ma stia certo che il poeta, il musicista e il vagabondo saranno in essa più felici dell'uomo che non ha mai imparato a dire: io sono io.

Pathos, piety, courage, —they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.

But how can people?" they exclaimed, when anything was attacked, and subscribed to Defence Societies.

but it seemed iniquitous that anyone should mispronounce the name of the man who was more to him than all the world

he saw from the vastness of the ruin what ecstasy he had lost, what a communion.

Who could help anything? Not only in sex, but in all things men have moved blindly, have evolved out of slime to dissolve into it when this accident of consequences is over.

The volume of their past must be restored to its shelf, and here, here was the place, amid darkness and perishing flowers.

He had acted wrongly, and was still being punished—but wrongly because he had tried to get the best of both worlds.

Most of the inhabitants of India do not mind how India is governed. Nor are the lower animals of England concerned about England, but in the tropics the indifference is more prominent, the inarticulate world is closer at hand and readier to resume control as soon as men are tired.

The volume of their past must be restored to its shelf, and here, here was the place, amid darkness and perishing flowers. He owed it to Alec also. He could suffer no mixing of the old in the new.

I was yours once till death if you'd cared to keep me

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.

I am so used to seeing the sort of play which deals with one man and two women. They do not leave me with the feeling I have made a full theatrical meal they do not give me the experience of the multiplicity of life.

Ideas are fatal to caste.

Though life is very glorious, it is difficult.

. . . life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t'other from which . . .

Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards.

The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.

Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's.

One has two duties - to be worried and not to be worried.