E.M. Forster Quotes

A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.

It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.

The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.

How do I know what I think until I see what I say?

Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off, but opening out.

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.

He lived to near the things he loved to seem poetical.

The novelist defines the story with the following example: If you are told that the king died and then the queen died, that is a sequence of events. If you were told that the king died and then the queen died of grief, that is a story that he was interested.

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.

Life' wrote a friend of mine, 'is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him.

It is so difficult - at least, I find it difficult - to understand people who speak the truth.

Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it.

Miss Abbott, don't worry over me. Some people are born not to do things. I'm one of them.

The advance of regret can be so gradual that it is impossible to say "yesterday I was happy, today I am not.

After all, is not a real Hell better than a manufactured Heaven?

This desire to govern a woman - it lies very deep, and men and women must fight it together.... But I do love you surely in a better way then he does." He thought. "Yes - really in a better way. I want you to have your own thoughts even when I hold you in my arms.

The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.

I knew you read the Symposium in the vac," he said in a low voice.
Maurice felt uneasy.
"Then you understand - without me saying more - "
"How do you mean?"
Durham could not wait. People were all around them, but with eyes that had gone intensely blue he whispered, "I love you.

I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's.

Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.

There was something better in life than this rubbish, if only he could get to it - love - nobility - big spaces where passion clasped peace, spaces no science could reach, but they existed for ever, full of woods some of them, and arched with majestic sky and a friend. . .

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear and merge into something else.

Books have to be read (worse luck, for it takes a long time); it is the only way of discovering what they contain.

School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible.

The Arts are not drugs. They are not guaranteed to act when taken. Something as mysterious and capricious as the creative impulse has to be released before they can act.

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.

He educated Maurice, or rather his spirit educated Maurice's spirit, for they themselves became equal. Neither thought "Am I led; am I leading?" Love had caught him out of triviality and Maurice out of bewilderment in order that two imperfect souls might touch perfection.

And if insight were sufficient, if the inner life were the whole of life, their happiness has been assured.

Science explained people, but could not understand them.

Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.

A book is a mirror; if an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to peer out.

One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister.

we may say that History develops, Art stands still

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

Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time - beautiful?

Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face.... The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due - she reminds us too much of a prima donna.

There stood a young man who had the figure of a Greek athlete and the face of an English one...Just where he began to be beautiful the clothes started.

My father says that there is only one perfect view - the view of the sky straight over our heads, and that all these views on earth are but bungled copies of it.

Why children?' he asked. 'Why always children? For love to end where it begins is far more beautiful, and Nature knows it.

I'm afraid that in nine cases out of ten Nature pulls one way and human nature another.

Night and day, wind and storm, tide and earthquake, impeded man no longer. He had harnessed Leviathan. All the old literature, with its praise of Nature, and its fear of Nature, rang false as the prattle of a child.

While her lips talked culture, her heart was planning to invite him to tea

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

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art.

In every remark he found a meaning, but not always the true meaning, and his life, though vivid, was largely a dream.

An acquaintance had become a lover, might become a husband, but would retain all that she had noted in the acquaintance; and love must confirm an old relation rather than reveal a new one.

What indeed is there to say? To be or not to be married, that was the question, and they had decided it in the affirmative.

The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept
those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected.

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.

Like every true performer, she was intoxicated by the mere feel of the notes: they were fingers caressing her own; and by touch, not by sound alone, did she come to her desire.

They travelled for thirteen hours down-hill, whilst the streams broadened and the mountains shrank, and the vegetation changed, and the people ceased being ugly and drinking beer, and began instead to drink wine and to be beautiful.

She stopped and leant her elbows against the parapet of the embankment. He did likewise. There is at times a magic in identity of position; it is one of the things that have suggested to us eternal comradeship.

All a child's life depends on the ideal it has of its parents. Destroy that and everything goes - morals, behavior, everything. Absolute trust in someone else is the essence of education.

I'd far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children.

For a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and - by some sad, strange irony - it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy.

I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows.

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.

There's never any great risk as long as you have money.

Human beings have their great chance in the novel.

But it was the stupidity of passion, which would rather have nothing than a little.

Sensual and spiritual are not easy words to use; that there are, perhaps, not two
Aphrodites, but one Aphrodite with a Janus face.

He will work off his crudities in time. I rather mistrust young men who slip into life gracefully.

Men were not gods after all, but as human and as clumsy as girls.

You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried the other. "I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but not everything.

We move between two darknesses.

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