Quotes About E.M. Forster

I've been wanting to write a book about what goes into creating a novel, and the story behind 'A Passage to India' is especially interesting.

A humanist has four leading characteristics - curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.

But this time I'm not to blame; I want you to believe that. I simply slipped into those violets. No, I want to be really truthful. I am a little to blame. The sky, you know, was gold, and the ground all blue, and for a moment he looked like some one in a book.

I will take you by a dear dirty back way, Miss Honeychurch, and if you bring me luck, we shall have an adventure.

Maurice was scandalized, horrified. He was shocked to the bottom of his suburban soul....

The Waves is an extraordinary achievement ... It is trembling on the edge. A little less - and it would lose its poetry. A little more - and it would be over into the abyss, and be dull and arty. It is her greatest book.

Italy is such a delightful place to live in if you happen to be a man. There one may enjoy that exquisite luxury of Socialism — that true Socialism which is based not on equality of income or character, but on the equality of manners.

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.

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

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

He was driven to use the prerogatives of his profession, to act the parson.

I love folklore and all festering superstitions.

Love had caught him out of triviality and Maurice out of bewilderment in order that two imperfect souls might touch perfection.

You could call your cousin a shit if you liked, but not an eunuch. Rotten style!

How annoyed I am with Society for wasting my time by making homosexuality criminal. The subterfuges, the self-consciousness that might have been avoided

There was no one even to tell her which, of all the sepulchral slabs that paved the nave and transepts, was the one that was really beautiful, the one that had been most praised by Mr. Ruskin.

a shamefaced world of precautions and barriers which may avert evil, but which do not seem to bring good...

He misliked the very word "interesting," connoting it with wasted energy and even with morbidity. Hard facts were enough for him.

acknowledged that Maurice had once lifted him out of aestheticism into the sun and wind of love.

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

Lucy does not stand for the medieval lady, who was rather an ideal to which she was bidden to lift her eyes when feeling serious.

So dark was the afternoon that some of the lights had been turned on inside, and the great building suggested a tomb, miraculously illuminated by spirits of the dead.

But whereas the story appeals to our curiosity and the plot to our intelligence, the pattern appeals to our aesthetic sense, it causes us to see the book as a whole.

Look at those flies on the ceiling. Why have you not drowned them?" "Huzoor, they return." "Like all evil things.