Quotes from E.M. Forster

He didn't care for Clive [anymore], but he could suffer from him.

The Arts are not drugs. They are not guaranteed to act when taken. Something as mysterious and capricious as the creative impulse has to be released before they can act.

I have always been like the Greeks and didn't know.

It never bored them to hear words, words; they breathed them with the cool night air.

For that little incident had impressed the three women more than might be supposed. It remained as a goblin footfall, as a hint that all is not for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and that beneath these superstructures of wealth and art there wanders an ill-fed boy, who has recovered his umbrella indeed, but who has left no address behind him, and no name.

It will be generally admitted that Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.

Don't brood too much," she wrote to Helen, "on the superiority of the unseen to the seen. It's true, but to brood on it is medieval. Our business is not to contrast the two, but to reconcile them.

Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterward.

Italy was offering her the most priceless of all possessions—her own soul.

I want to see you not through the machine,' said Kuno. 'I want to speak to you not through the wearisome machine.

A happy ending was imperative

I feel to you as Pippa to her fiancé, only far more nobly, far more deeply, body and soul, no starved medievalism of course, only a – a particular harmony of body and soul that I don't think women have even guessed. But you know.

You, who have just crossed the Roof of the World, will not want to hear an account of the little hills that I saw — low, colorless hills. But to me they were living and the turf that covered them was a skin, under which their muscles rippled, and I felt that those hills had called with incalculable force to men in the past, and that men had loved them. Now they sleep — perhaps for ever. They commune with humanity in dreams.

She was parting from these Wilcoxes for the second time. Paul and his mother, ripple and great wave, had flowed into her life and ebbed out of it forever. The ripple had left no traces behind: the wave had strewn at her feet fragments torn from the unknown. A curious seeker, she stood for a while at the verge of the sea that tells so little, but tells a little, and watched the outgoing of this last tremendous tide.

She was no longer examining life, but being examined by it; she had become a real person.

Anyone can find places, but the finding of people is a gift from God.

It's better to be fooled than to be suspicious.

Rudeness affected Margaret like a bitter taste in the mouth. It poisoned life. At times it is necessary, but woe to those who employ it without due need.

There were letters for her at the bureau-one from her brother, full of athletics and biology; one from her mother, delightful as only mother's letters could be. She had read in it of the crocuses which had been bought for yellow and were coming up puce, of the new parlour-maid, who had watered the ferns with essence of lemonade...

London was but a foretaste of this nomadic civilization which is altering human nature so profoundly, and throws upon personal relations a stress greater than they have ever borne before. Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle, and the binding force that once exercised on character must be entrusted to Love alone. May Love be equal to the task!

He questioned Maurice, who, when he grasped the point, was understood to reply that deeds are more important than words.

Ladies sheltering behind men, men sheltering behind servants - the whole system's wrong, and she must challenge it.

Don't you think there are two great things in life that we ought to aim at—truth and kindness? Let's have both if we can, but let's be sure of having one or the other.

Boys are marvellous creatures. Perhaps they will sink below the brutes; perhaps they will attain to a woman's tenderness.