E.M. Forster Quotes - Page 2

They chose to regard it as a miraculous preservation.
E.M. Forster
Humility is a quality for which I have only a limited admiration. In many phases of life it is a great mistake and degenerates into defensiveness and hypocrisy.
E.M. Forster
He was driven to use the prerogatives of his profession, to act the parson.
E.M. Forster
There is much that is immortal in this medieval lady. The dragons have gone, and so have the knights, but still she lingers in our midst. She reigned in many an early Victorian castle, and was Queen of much early Victorian song. It is sweet to protect her in the intervals of business, sweet to pay her honour when she has cooked our dinner well. But alas! the creature grows degenerate. In her heart also there are springing up strange desires. She too is enamoured of heavy winds, and vast panoramas, and green expanses of the sea. She has marked the kingdom of this world, how full it is of wealth, and beauty, and war--a radiant crust, built around the central fires, spinning towards the receding heavens. Men, declaring that she inspires them to it, move joyfully over the surface, having the most delightful meetings with other men, happy, not because they are masculine, but because they are alive. Before the show breaks up she would like to drop the august title of the Eternal Woman, and go there as her transitory self.
E.M. Forster
In time, Mr Hall, one gets to recognize that sneer, that hardness, for fornication extends far beyond the actual deed. Were it a deed only, I for one would not hold it anathema. But when the nations went a whoring they invariably ended by denying God, I think, and until all sexual irregularities and not some of them are penal the Church will never reconquer England.
E.M. Forster
Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. I do not believe in it, for its own sake, at all... My lawgivers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul. My temple stands not upon Mount Moriah but in the Elysian Field where even the immoral are admitted. My motto is 'Lord, I disbelieve — help thou my unbelief.
E.M. Forster
Love had failed. Love was an emotion through which you occasionally enjoyed yourself. it could not do things.
E.M. Forster
He was not sure, but liked it. It recurred when they met suddenly or had been silent. It beckoned to him across intellect, saying, "This is all very well, you're clever, we know—but come!" It haunted him so that he watched for it while his brain and tongue were busy, and when it came he felt himself replying, "I'll come—I didn't know.""You can't help yourself now. You must come.""I don't want to help myself.""Come then."He did come. He flung down all the barriers—not at once, for he did not live in a house that can be destroyed in a day.
E.M. Forster
But they did not chatter much, for the boy, when he liked a person, would as soon sit silent in his company as speak.
E.M. Forster
Food, the stoking-up process, the keeping alive of an individual flame, the process that begins before birth and is continued after it by the mother, and finally taken over by the individual himself, who goes on day after day putting an assortment of objects into a hole in his face without becoming surprised or bored.
E.M. Forster
I was brought up to be honest; the trouble is it gets me nowhere." Liking her better, he smiled and said, "It'll get us to heaven." "Will it?" "If heaven existed." "Do you not believe in heaven, Mr. Fielding, may I ask?" she said, looking at him shyly. "I do not. Yet I believe that honesty gets us there.
E.M. Forster
The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.
E.M. Forster
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.
E.M. Forster
The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.
E.M. Forster
A matter neither sensual nor sensational is ignored by the art of today.
E.M. Forster
They had nothing in common but the English language, and tried by its help to express what neither of them understood.
E.M. Forster
How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?
E.M. Forster
The Machine is the friend of ideas and the enemy of superstition: the Machine is omnipotent, eternal; blessed is the Machine.
E.M. Forster
Vashti was seized with the terrors of direct experience. She shrank back into the room, and the wall closed up again.
E.M. Forster
In daily life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists. We know each other approximately, by external signs, and these serve well enough as a basis for society and even for intimacy. But people in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed. And this is why they often seem more definite than characters in history, or even our own friends; we have been told all about them that can be told; even if they are imperfect or unreal they do not contain any secrets, whereas our friends do and must, mutual secrecy being one of the conditions of life upon this globe.
E.M. Forster
Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.
E.M. Forster
There are different ways of evil and I prefer mine to yours.
E.M. Forster
Adventures do occur, but not punctually.
E.M. Forster
Mr. Pembroke, watching his broad back, desired to bury a knife in it. The desire passed, partly because it was unclerical, partly because he had no knife, and partly because he soon blurred over what had happened. To him all criticism was "rudeness": he never heeded it, for he never needed it: he was never wrong.
E.M. Forster
Standing each by his monster, they looked at each other, and smiled
E.M. Forster
I think everyone fails, but there are so many kinds of failure.
E.M. Forster
The past is devoid of meaning like the present, and a refuge for cowards.
E.M. Forster
He lived on, miserable and misunderstood, as before, and increasingly lonely. One cannot write those words too often: Maurice’s loneliness: it increased.
E.M. Forster
With the first jolt he was in daylight; they had left the gateways of King’s Cross, and were under blue sky. Tunnels followed, and after each the sky grew bluer, and from the embankment at Finsbury Park he had his first sight of the sun. It rolled along behind the eastern smokes — a wheel, whose fellow was the descending moon — and as yet it seemed the servant of the blue sky, not its lord. He dozed again. Over Tewin Water it was day. To the left fell the shadow of the embankment and its arches; to the right Leonard saw up into the Tewin Woods and towards the church, with its wild legend of immortality. Six forest trees — that is a fact — grow out of one of the graves in Tewin churchyard. The grave’s occupant — that is the legend — is an atheist, who declared that if God existed, six forest trees would grow out of her grave. These things in Hertfordshire; and farther afield lay the house of a hermit — Mrs. Wilcox had known him — who barred himself up, and wrote prophecies, and gave all he had to the poor. While, powdered in between, were the villas of business men, who saw life more steadily, though with the steadiness of the half-closed eye. Over all the sun was streaming, to all the birds were singing, to all the primroses were yellow, and the speedwell blue, and the country, however they interpreted her, was uttering her cry of “now. ” She did not free Leonard yet, and the knife plunged deeper into his heart as the train drew up at Hilton. But remorse had become beautiful.
E.M. Forster
…”The Emersons who were at Florence, do you mean? No, I don’t suppose it will prove to be them. It is probably a long cry from them to friends of Mr. Vyse’s. Oh, Mrs. Honeychurch, the oddest people! The queerest people! For our part we liked them, didn’t we?” He appealed to Lucy. “There was a great scene over some violets. They picked violets and filled all the vases in the room of these very Miss Alans who have failed to come to Cissie Villa. Poor little ladies! So shocked and so pleased. It used to be one of Miss Catharine’s great stories. ‘My dear sister loves flowers,’ it began. They found the whole room a mass of blue — vases and jugs — and the story ends with ‘So ungentlemanly and yet so beautiful.’ It is all very difficult. Yes, I always connect those Florentine Emersons with violets.”…
E.M. Forster
Italy and London are the only places where I don't feel to exist on sufferance.
E.M. Forster
As her time in Florence drew to a close she was only at ease amongst those to whom she felt indifferent.
E.M. Forster
It is not rubbish! It is the part of people that you do not understand.
E.M. Forster
She grew more and more vexed with his dignified behavior. By a cruel irony, she was drawing out what was best in his disposition.
E.M. Forster
Unless we remember we cannot understand.
E.M. Forster
The issues Miss Quested had raised were so much more important than she was herself that people inevitably forgot her.
E.M. Forster
Men were not gods after all, but as human and as clumsy as girls.
E.M. Forster
He will work off his crudities in time. I rather mistrust young men who slip into life gracefully.
E.M. Forster
It is the starved imagination, not the well-nourished, that is afraid.
E.M. Forster
There is only a certain amount of kindness in the world…just as there is a certain amount of light. We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things…Choose a place where you won’t do very much harm and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.
E.M. Forster
Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.
E.M. Forster
Human beings have their great chance in the novel.
E.M. Forster
How can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in exile. The important towns they build are only retreats, their quarrels the malaise of men who cannot find their way home. India knows of their trouble. She knows of the whole world's trouble, to its uttermost depth. She calls "Come" through her hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august. But come to what? She has never defined. She is not a promise, only an appeal.
E.M. Forster
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.
E.M. Forster
Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul.
E.M. Forster
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.
E.M. Forster
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.
E.M. Forster
As for her hair, or rather hairs, they are too complicated to describe, but one system went down her back, lying in a thick pad there, while another, created for a lighter destiny, rippled around her forehead.
E.M. Forster
We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
E.M. Forster
People turned out to be alive. Hitherto he had supposed that they were what he pretended to be - flat pieces of cardboard stamped with a conventional design… there came by no process of reason a conviction that they were human beings with feelings akin to his own.
E.M. Forster
When we were only acquaintances, you let me be myself, but now you're always protecting me... I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. Can't I be trusted to face the truth but I must get it second-hand through you? A woman's place!
E.M. Forster
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.
E.M. Forster
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.
E.M. Forster
I'd far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children.
E.M. Forster
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.
E.M. Forster
Either life entails courage or it ceases to be life.
E.M. Forster
We move between two darknesses.
E.M. Forster
While her lips talked culture, her heart was planning to invite him to tea
E.M. Forster
No; look out for the part where you think you have done with the goblins and they come back,' breathed Helen, as the music started with a goblin walking quietly over the universe, from end to end.
E.M. Forster
The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom.
E.M. Forster