Quotes from E.M. Forster

a feeling that terrestrial facts must be ignored, and that the abolition of respirators was a positive gain.

Gray clouds were charging across tissues of white, which stretched and shredded and tore slowly, until through their final layers there gleamed a hint of the disappearing blue. Summer was retreating. The wind roared, the trees groaned, yet the noise seemed insufficient for those vast operations in heaven. The weather was breaking up, breaking, broken, and it is a sense of the fit rather than of the supernatural that equips such crises with the salvos of angelic artillery.

The female mind, though cruelly practical in daily life, cannot bear to hear ideals belittled in conversation, and Miss Schlegel was asked however she could say such dreadful things, and what it would profit Mr. Bast if he gained the whole world and lost his own soul. She answered, "Nothing, but he would not gain his soul until he had gained a little of the world.

It is like you to have thought of such a beautiful thing." Not a thing, only an ending," said Helen rather sadly; and the sense of tragedy closed in on Margaret again as soon as she left the house.

and beneath his chivalry to Miss Quested resentment lurked, waiting its day - perhaps there is a grain of resentment in all chivalry.

Helen forgot people. They were husks that had enclosed her emotion.

Not even to herself dare she blame Helen. She could not assess her trespass by any moral code; it was everything or nothing. Morality can tell us that murder is worse than stealing, and group most sins in an order all must approve, but it cannot group Helen. The surer its pronouncements on this point, the surer may we be that morality is not speaking. Christ was evasive when they questioned Him. It is those that cannot connect who hasten to cast the first stone.

The tide had begun to ebb. Margaret leant over the parapet and watched it sadly. Mr. Wilcox had forgotten his wife, Helen her lover; she herself was probably forgetting. Every one moving. Is it worth while attempting the past when there is this continual flux even in the hearts of men?

Nothing that can stop you retreating into splendour and beauty—into the thoughts and beliefs that make the real life—the real you.

Don't act. Or act better.

The doctrine of laisser-faire will not work in the material world.

It is well to be remembered with love. It is not so very dreadful to be forgotten entirely. But if we shall resent anything on earth at all, we shall resent the consecration of a deserted room.

You only care about the things that you can use, and therefore arrange them in the following order: Money, supremely useful; intellect, rather useful; imagination, of no use at all.

Both times it was loneliness, and the night, and panic afterwards.

Sei que morrerei um dia e não quero morrer, nem quero que tu morras. Se algum de nós partir, não resta nada para ambos. Não sei se chamas a isso puro e imaculado. - Sim, chamo. - Nesse caso, prefiro ser sujo - disse Maurice, após uma pausa.

The horrible truth, that wicked people are capable of love, stood naked before her, and her moral being was abashed.

To such a height was he lifted, that without regret he could now have told her that he was her worshipper too. But what was the use of telling her? For all the wonderful things had happened.

She and the victim seemed alone in a world of unreality, and she loved him absolutely, perhaps for half an hour.

There is at times a magic in identity of position; it is one of the things that have suggested to us eternal comradeship.

The sky settles everything--not only climates and seasons but when the earth shall be beautiful.

One doesn't ask plain questions. There aren't such things.

He did not know that he talked a good deal of nonsense, and that the sheer force of his intellect was weakened by the sight of Monteriano, and by the thought of dentistry within those walls.

Quando o amor se vai, é lembrado não como amor, mas como algo diferente. Felizes são os ignorantes, pois esquecem por completo, e nunca estão conscientes da insensatez e da lascívia do passado, das longas e inúteis conversações.

The Wilcoxes were not lacking in affection; they had it royally, but they did not know how to use it. It was the talent in the napkin, and, for a warm-hearted man, Charles had conveyed very little joy. As he watched his father shuffling up the road, he had a vague regret—a wish that something had been different somewhere—a wish (though he did not express it thus) that he had been taught to say 'I' in his youth.