Quotes from E.M. Forster

Here had lived an elder race, to which we look back with disquietude. The country which we visit at week-ends was really a home to it, and the graver sides of life, the deaths, the partings, the yearnings for love, have their deepest expression in the heart of the fields.

We are not in the law courts. There are many ways of being a man; mine is to express what is deepest in my heart.

It's a room that men have spoilt through trying to make it nice for women. Men don't know that we want—" "And never will.

But Italy worked some marvel in her. It gave her light...

Quizás nadie quisiese tal amor, pero podía ya no sentirse avergonzado de él, porque aquel amor era "él", no el cuerpo o el alma, no alma y cuerpo, sino "él" viviendo en ambos.

Uma campainha elétrica ressoou. A mulher pressionou um interruptor e a música cessou. "Acho que tenho de ver quem é", ela pensou, resignada, e pôs sua poltrona em movimento. A poltrona, assim como a música, era acionada por um mecanismo e deslizou com a mulher para o outro lado do quarto de onde provinha o som inoportuno da campainha.

There was simply the sense that she had found wings, and meant to use them.

We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness.

As is Man to the Universe, so was the mind of Mr. Wilcox to the minds of some men — a concentrated light upon a tiny spot, a little Ten Minutes moving self-contained through its appointed years. No Pagan he, who lives for the Now, and may be wiser than all philosophers. He lived for the five minutes that have past, and the five to come; he had the business mind.

By these days it was a demerit to be muscular. Each infant was examined at birth, and all who promised undue strength were destroyed. Humanitarians may protest, but it would have been no true kindness to let an athlete live; he would never have been happy in that state of life to which the Machine had called him; he would have yearned for trees to climb, rivers to bathe in, meadows and hills against which he might measure his body. Man must be adapted to his surroundings, must he not?

It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven. That is not imagination. No, it kills it.

Life had proved a blind alley, with a muck heap at the end of it, and he must cut back and start again.

God, being altogether too large an order, did not worry him: he could not conceive of any censure being more terrific than, say, Joey Fetherstonhaugh's, who kept in the rooms below, or of any Hell as bitter as Coventry.

At Oxford he learned that the importance of human beings has been vastly over rated by specialists.

One knew that she worshipped the past, and that the instinctive wisdom the past can alone bestow had descended upon her - that wisdom to which we give the clumsy name of aristocracy

The abandonment of personality that is a possible prelude to love

The story that is a story and sounded so healthy and stood no nonsense cannot sincerely lead to any conclusion but the grave.

Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice, and we welcome 'nerves' or any other shibboleth that will cloak our personal desire.

She did not acknowledge that her brain was warped, for the brain itself must assist in that acknowledgement, and she was disordering the very instruments of life.

Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wants to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.

At such moments the soul retires within, to float upon the bosom of a deeper stream, and has communion with the dead, and sees the world's glory not diminished, but different in kind to what she has supposed.

Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form...

The more people one knows the easier it becomes to replace them

When we poor blacks take bribes, we perform what we are bribed to perform, and the law discovers us in consequence. The English take and do nothing. I admire them.