Quotes from E.M. Forster

The Garden of Eden," pursued Mr. Emerson, still descending, "which you place in the past, is really yet to come. We shall enter it when we no longer despise our bodies.

They have yielded to the only enemy that matters - the enemy within.

The stories of Harmonius and Aristogeiton, of Phaedrus of the Theban Band were well enough for those whose hearts were empty, but no substitute for life. That Clive should occasionally prefer them puzzled him.

Talk away. If you bore us, we have books." With this invitation Rickie began to relate his history. The reader who has no book will be obliged to listen to it.

He longed for smut, but heard little and contributed less, and his chief indecencies were solitary.

I'm always right. I'm quite uneasy at being always right so often.

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch....

If you pass life by it's jolly well going to pass you by in the future. If you're frightened it's all right--that's no harm; fear is an emotion.

What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?

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

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

The Waves is an extraordinary achievement ... It is trembling on the edge. A little less - and it would lose its poetry. A little more - and it would be over into the abyss, and be dull and arty. It is her greatest book.

He had said it bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says other things.

I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.

The song of the future must transcend creed.

But let yourself go. You are inclined to get muddled, if I may judge from last night. 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. By understanding George you may learn to understand yourself. It will be good for both of you.

A rebel she was, but not of the kind he understood - a rebel who desired, not a wider dwelling-room, but equality beside the man she loved. For Italy was offering her the most priceless of all possessions - her own soul.

No English novelist is as great as Tolstoy –that is to say, has given so complete a picture of man's life, both on its domestic and heroic side. No English novelist has explored man's soul as deeply as Dostoyevsky. And no novelist anywhere has analysed the modern consciousness as successfully as Marcel Proust.

The sun was already declining and each of the trees held a premonition of night.

The human mind is not a dignified organ, and I do not see how we can exercise it sincerely except through eclecticism. And the only advice I would offer my fellow eclectics is: "Do not be proud of your inconsistency. It is a pity, it is a pity that we should be equipped like this. It is a pity that Man cannot be at the same time impressive and truthful.

an Italian can never be ignored, least of all when he has a grievance.

She watched the moon, whose radiance stained with primrose the purple of the surrounding sky. In England the moon had seemed dead and alien; here she was caught in the shawl of night together with earth and all the other stars.

And the triviality faded from their faces, though it left something behind -- the knowledge that they could never be parted because their love was rooted in common things.

She had a strong, if erroneous, conviction of her own futility, and wished she had never come out of her backwater, where nothing happened except art and literature, and where no one ever got married or succeeded in remaining engaged.