Quotes from E.M. Forster

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

In Rome one had simply to sit still and feel.

But books meant so much for him he forgot that they were a bewilderment to others.

If one doesn't worry, how does one understand?

They were his last words, because Maurice had disappeared thereabouts, leaving no trace of his presence except a little pile of the petals of the evening primrose, which mourned from the ground like an expiring fire. To the end of his life Clive was not sure of the exact moment of departure, and with the approach of old age he grew uncertain whether the moment had yet occurred.

We are reverting to the civilization of luggage, and historians of the future will note how the middle classes accreted possessions without taking root in the earth, and may find in this the secret of their imaginative poverty.

One touch of regret- not the canny substitute but the true regret from the heart- would have made him a different man, and the British Empire a different institution.

I'm a holy man minus the holiness. Hand that on to your three spies, and tell them to put it in their pipes.

I'm afraid that in nine cases out of ten Nature pulls one way and human nature another.

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

Life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish tother from which.

For the barrier of language is sometimes a blessed barrier, which only lets pass what is good. Or--to put the thing less cynically--we may be better in new clean words, which have never been tainted by our pettiness or vice. Phillip, at all events, lived more graciously in Italian, the very phrases of which entice one to be happy and kind.

Secrecy has this disadvantage: we lose the sense of proportion; we cannot tell whether our secret is important or not.

Beautiful conventions received them--while beyond the barrier Maurice wandered, the wrong words on his lips, the wrong desires in his heart, and his arms full of air.

And in time there will come a generation that has got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation seraphically free from taint of personality, which will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine.

How indeed is it possible for one human being to be sorry for all the sadness that meets him on the face of the earth, for the pain that is endured not only by men, but by animals and plants, and perhaps by the stones?

He never even thought of tenderness and emotion; his considerations about Durham remained cold. Durham didn't dislike him, he was sure. That was all he wanted. One thing at a time. He didn't so much as have hopes, for hope distracts, and he had a great deal to see to.

He stretched out his hands as he sang, sadly, because all beauty is sad…The poem had done no 'good' to anyone, but it was a passing reminder, a breath from the divine lips of beauty, a nightingale between two worlds of dust. Less explicit than the call to Krishna, it voiced our loneliness nevertheless, our isolation, our need for the Friend who never comes yet is not entirely disproved.

Everything must be like something, so what is this ike?

Conversation was tedious; she wanted something big, and she believed that it would have come to her on the windswept platform of an electric tram.

But it is sometimes as difficult to lose one's temper as it is difficult at other times to keep it.

We reach in desperation beyond the fog, beyond the very stars, the voids of the universe are ransacked to justify the monster, and stamped with a human face. London is religions opportunity--not the decorous religion of theologians, but an anthropomorphic, crude. Yes, the continuous flow would be tolerable if a man of our own sort--not anyone pompous or tearful--were caring for us up in the sky.

Those who prepare for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themsleves at the expense of joy.

Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man.