Quotes from E.M. Forster

Against my will I have become normal.

Perhaps it was Helen's way of falling in love--a curious way to Margaret, whose agony and whose contempt of Henry were yet imprinted with his image. Helen forgot people. They were husks that had enclosed her emotion.

It matter so little to the majority of living beings what the minority, that calls itself human, desires or decides.

It's a risk, so's everything else, and we'll only live once.

I, though less optimistic, had supposed that knowledge would bring understanding. We had not realized that what the public loathes in homosexuality is not the thing itself but having to think about it

For human intercourse, as soon as we look at it for its own sake and not as a social adjunct, is seen to be haunted by a spectre. We cannot understand each other, except in a rough and ready way; we cannot reveal ourselves, even when we want to; what we call intimacy is only a makeshift; perfect knowledge is an illusion.

Mr. Ansell was not merely a man of some education; he had what no education can bring — the power of detecting what is important. Like many fathers, he had spared no expense over his boy, — he had borrowed money to start him at a rapacious and fashionable private school; he had sent him to tutors; he had sent him to Cambridge. But he knew that all this was not the important thing. The important thing was freedom.

Remember that we must all die: all these personal relations we try to live by are temporary. I used to feel death selected people, it is a notion one gets from novels, because some of the characters are usually left talking at the end. Now 'death spares no one' begins to be real.

You have less restraint rather than more as you grow older. Think it over and alter yourself, or we shan't have happy lives.

In the dawn of the world our weakly must be exposed on Mount Taygetus, in its twilight our strong will suffer euthanasia, that the Machine may progress, that the Machine may progress, that the Machine may progress eternally.

At my age one's seldom amazed," he said, smiling. "Marriage is too absurd in any case. It begins and continues for such very slight reasons. The social business props it up on one side, and the theological business on the other, but neither of them are marriage, are they? I've friends who can't remember why they married, no more can their wives. I suspect that it mostly happens haphazard, though afterwards various noble reasons are invented. About marriage I am cynical.

She was like a woman of Leonardo Da Vinci's, whom we love not so much for herself as for the things that she will not tell us.

They go forth into it with well deveoped bodies,fairly developed minds and undeveloped hearts... An undeveloped heart, not a cold one. The difference is important...

One. Margaret's own faith held firm. She knew the human soul will be merged, if it be merged at all, with the stars and the sea.

How wide the gulf between Henry as he was and Henry as Helen thought he ought to be! And she herself—hovering as usual between the two, now accepting men as they are, now yearning with her sister for Truth. Love and Truth—their warfare seems eternal. Perhaps the whole visible world rests on it, and if they were one, life itself, like the spirits when Prospero was reconciled to his brother, might vanish into air, into thin air.

Food, the stoking-up process, the keeping alive of an individual flame, the process that begins before birth and is continued after it by the mother, and finally taken over by the individual himself, who goes on day after day putting an assortment of objects into a hole in his face without becoming surprised or bored.

With his head on the fender and all his limbs relaxed, he felt almost as safe as he felt once when his mother killed a ghost in the passage by carrying him through it in her arms. There was no ghost now; he was frightened at reality; he was frightened at the splendors and horrors of the world.

Pray don't waste time mourning over me. There's enough sorrow in the world, isn't there, without trying to invent it. Good-bye.

Epilogues are for Tolstoy

You can do what you like, but the outcome will be the same.

affection explains everything

He had no racial feeling—not because he was superior to his brother civilians, but because he had matured in a different atmosphere, where the herd instinct does not flourish.

Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.

The unbeliever has always such a very clear idea as to what Belief ought to be, I wish I had half his certainty.