Quotes from E.M. Forster

Whom does Love concern beyond the beloved and the lover? Yet his impact deluges a hundred shores.

Personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever, and not this outer life of telegrams and anger.

But Love cannot understand this. He cannot comprehend another's infinity; he is conscious only of his own—flying sunbeam, falling rose, pebble that asks for one quiet plunge below the fretting interplay of space and time. He knows that he will survive at the end of things, and be gathered by Fate as a jewel from the slime, and be handed with admiration round the assembly of the gods.

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.

yet, have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time—beautiful?" "Beautiful?" said Miss Bartlett, puzzled at the word. "Are not beauty and delicacy the same?" "So one would have thought," said the other helplessly. "But things are so difficult, I sometimes think.

Why? Why were most big things unladylike?

I shall want to live, I tell you.

If they were hypocrites they did not know it, and their hypocrisy had every chance of setting and of becoming true.

That there are shops abroad, even in Athens, never occurred to them, for they regarded travel as a species of warfare, only to be undertaken by those who have been fully armed at the Haymarket Stores.

Mrs. Munt—such is human nature—determined that she would champion the lovers. She was not going to be bullied by a severe young man.

Every barbarian must give the Acropolis its chance once.

There are moments when the inner life actually "pays," when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use.  Such moments are still rare in the West; that they come at all promises a fairer future.

As he alighted his name had been called out of dreams. The violence went out of his heart, and a purity that he had never imagined dwelt there instead. His friend had called him. He stood for a moment entranced, then the new emotion found him words, and laying his hand very gently upon the pillows he answered 'Clive!

He felt that the English are a comic institution, and enjoyed being misunderstood by them.

Once a cad, always a cad

A short-frocked edition of Charles also regards them placidly; a perambulator edition is squeaking; a third edition is expected shortly. Nature is turning out Wilcoxes in this peaceful abode, so that they may inherit the earth.

She always was highly strung," pursued Henry, leaning back in the car as it shot past the church. "A tendency to spiritualism and those things, though nothing serious. Musical, literary, artistic, but I should say normal—a very charming girl.

She "never exactly understood," she would say in after years, "how he managed to strengthen her. It was as if he had made her see the whole of everything at once.

A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise.

Her idea of business— "Henry, why do people who have enough money try to get more money?" Her idea of politics— "I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars

He filled a pipe with the tobacco that he had smoked for the last six years, and watched Romance wither.

Untrue; but then, so is most information.

Nothing ever happens to me, " she reflected..... An older person at such an hour and in such a place might think that sufficient was happening to him, and rest content. Lucy desired more.

You are not to say 'stink,' " interrupted Helen; "at least, you may say it, but you must pretend you are being funny while you say it.