Quotes from E.M. Forster

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.

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.

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

How do I know what I think until I see what I say?

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.

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

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.

Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

This desire to govern a woman—it lies very deep, and men and women must fight it together.... But I do love you surely in a better way than he does. He thought. Yes—really in a better way. I want you to have your own thoughts even when I hold you in my arms.

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

I am an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort.

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.

You do care a little for me, I know... but nothing to speak of, and you don't love me. I was yours once till death if you'd cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now... and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked, and attend to your own happiness.

Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.

Adventures do occur, but not punctually.

Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.

Life' wrote a friend of mine, 'is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.

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.

After all, is not a real Hell better than a manufactured Heaven?

Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate.