Quotes from E.M. Forster

And that is why novels, even when they are about wicked people, can solace us: they suggest a more comprehensible and thus more manageable human race, they give us the illusion of perspicacity and of power.

The Machine hums! Did you know that? Its hum penetrates our blood, and may even guide our thoughts. Who knows! I was getting beyond its power.

I think he is nice and tiresome. I differ from him on almost every point of any importance, and so, I expect - I may say I hope - you will differ. But his is a type one disagrees with rather than deplores. When he first came here he not unnaturally put people's backs up. He has no tact and no manners - I don't mean by that that he has bad manners - and he will not keep his opinions to himself

She could not have believed that stones, a Loggia, a fountain, a palace tower, would have such significance. For a moment she understood the nature of ghosts.

Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him—that is the best account of it that has been yet given. Squalor and tragedy can beckon to all that is great in us; and strengthen the wings of love.

By God, if you'd split on me to Mr Ducie, I'd have broken you. It might have cost me hundreds, but I've got them, and the police always back my sort against yours. You don't know. We'd have got you into quod, for blackmail, after which — I'd have blown out my brains.' 'Killed yourself? Death?' 'I should have known by that time that I loved you. Too late . . . everything's always too late.

He chanced to be in a lucid critical mood, and would not sympathize with exaltation.

But he saw only dying light and a dead land. He uttered no prayer, believed in no deity, and knew that the past was devoid of meaning like the present, and a refuge for cowards.

Vagueness spurred him into knight errantry.

Fa niente, sono vecchia

It's better to be fooled than to be suspicious'—that the confidence trick is the work of man, but the want-of-confidence trick is the work of the devil.

A matter neither sensual nor sensational is ignored by the art of today.

Travel was a species of warfare.

London only stimulates, it cannot sustain

They chose to regard it as a miraculous preservation.

To attribute these two great developments to the Central Committee, is to take a very narrow view of civilization. The Central Committee announced the developments, it is true, but they were no more the cause of them than were the kings of the imperialistic period the cause of war.

We merely want a small house with large rooms, and plenty of them.

Lucy was slow to follow what people said, but quick enough to detect what they meant. She missed Cecil's epigram, but grasped the feeling that prompted it.

He was thinking of the irony of friendship—so strong it is, and so fragile. We fly together, like straws in an eddy, to part in the open stream.

Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another.

The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms. Seated in her armchair she spoke, while they in their armchairs heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well.

Something had changed. He had journeyed—as on rare occasions a man must—till he stood behind right and wrong. On the banks of the grey torrent of life, love is the only flower.

S]he might yet reveal depths of strangeness, if not of meaning.

Can what they call civilization be right, if people mayn't die in the room where they were born?