Quotes from E.M. Forster

for literature had always been a solace for him, something that the ugliness of facts could not spoil.

A slow nature such as Maurice's appears insensitive, for it needs time even to feel.

You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.

Madness is not for everyone, but Maurice's proved the thunderbolt that dispels the clouds. The storm had been working up not for three days as he supposed, but for six years. It had brewed in the insecurities of being where no eye pierces, his surroundings had thickened it. It had burst and he had not died. The brilliancy of day was around him, he stood upon the mountain range that overshadows youth, he saw.

He had known so much about her once -what she thought, how she felt, the reasons for her actions. And now he only knew that he loved her, and all the other knowledge seemed passing from him just as he needed it most.

I only wish the poets would say this too: love is of the body; not the body, but of the the body. Ah! the misery that would be saved if we confessed that! Ah! for a little directness to liberate the soul!

As her time in Florence drew to a close she was only at ease amongst those to whom she felt indifferent.

He would not deceive himself so much. He would not – and this was the test – pretend to care about women when the only sex that attracted him was his own. He loved men and always had loved them. He longed to embrace them and mingle his being with theirs. Now that the man who returned his love had been lost, he admitted this.

Perhaps anything that he did would have pleased Lucy, but his awkwardness went straight to her heart.

It so happened that Lucy, who found daily life rather chaotic, entered a more solid world when she opened the piano. She was then no longer either deferential or patronizing; no longer either a rebel or a slave.

Man can learn everything if he will but try.

Let her go to Italy!" he cried. "Let her meddle with what she doesn't understand!

Italy and London are the only places where I don't feel to exist on sufferance.

She hated war and liked soldiers—it was one of her amiable inconsistencies.

Every man has somewhere about him some belief for which he'd die. Only isn't it improbable that your parents and guardians told it to you? If there is one won't it be part of your own flesh and spirit?

I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I'd like to be.

It was unbearable, and he thought again, 'How unhappy I am!' and became happier.

One minute. You know nothing about him. He probably has his own joys and interests- wife, children, snug little home. That's where we practical fellows'- he smiled-'are more tolerant than you intellectuals. We live and let live, and assume that things are jogging on fairly well elsewhere, and that the ordinary plain man may be trusted to look after his own affairs.

The present flowed by them like a stream. The tree rustled. It had made music before they were born, and would continue after their deaths, but its song was of the moment. The moment had passed. The tree rustled again. Their senses were sharpened, and they seemed to apprehend life. Life passed. The tree rustled again.

The bully and the victim never quite forget their first relations.

What does unhappiness matter when we are all unhappy together?

He had a theory that musicians are incredibly complex, and know far less than other artists what they want and what they are; that they puzzle themselves as well as their friends; that their psychology is a modern development, and has not yet been understood.

The past is devoid of meaning like the present, and a refuge for cowards.

He lived on, miserable and misunderstood, as before, and increasingly lonely. One cannot write those words too often: Maurice's loneliness: it increased.