E.M. Forster Quotes (80 Quotes)

It never bored them to hear words, words; they breathed them with the cool night air.

By the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes--a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.

Lucy was suffering from the most grievous wrong which this world has yet discovered: diplomatic advantage had been taken of her sincerity, of her craving for sympathy and love. Such a wrong is not easily forgotten. Never again did she expose herself without due consideration and precaution against rebuff. And such a wrong may react disastrously upon the soul.

We move between two darknesses.

So does my grocer stigmatize me when I complain of the quality of his sultanas, and he answers in one breath that they are the best sultanas, and how can I expect the best sultanas at that price?

Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate.

Conversation was tedious; she wanted something big, and she believed that it would have come to her on the windswept platform of an electric tram.

Man has to pick up the use of his functions as he goes along- especially the function of Love.

A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man.

So never give in,ö continued the girl, and restated again and again the vague yet convincing plea that the Invisible lodges against the Visible. Her excitement grew as she tried to cut the rope that fastened Leonard to the earth. Woven of bitter experience, it resisted her. Presently the waitress entered and gave her a letter from Margaret. Another note, addressed to Leonard, was inside. They read them, listening to the murmurings of the river.

Man can learn everything if he will but try.

Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?

Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.

All men are equal - all men, that is, who possess umbrellas.

The affections are more reticent than the passions, and their expression more subtle.

No one, except Ronny, had any idea of what passed in her mind, and he only dimly, for where there is officialism every human relationship suffers.

Do you suppose there's any difference between spring in nature and spring in man? But there we go, praising the one and condemning the other as improper, ashamed that the same laws work eternally through both.

One doesn't come to Italy for niceness, one comes for life!

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.

The hedge was a half-painted picture which would be finished in a few days.

On can tip too much as well as too little, indeed the coin that buys the exact truth has not yet been minted.

Don't go fighting against the Spring.

Passion should believe itself irresistible. It should forget civility and consideration and all the other curses of a refined nature. Above all, it should never ask for leave where there is a right of way.

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.

To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it.

Outside the arch, always there seemed another arch. And beyond the remotest echo, a silence.

He was interested in the sudden friendship between two women so apparently dissimilar as Miss Bartlett and Miss Lavish. They were always in each other's company, with Lucy a slighted third. Miss Lavish he believed he understood, but Miss Bartlett might reveal unknown depths of strangeness, though not, perhaps, of meaning.

She only felt that the candle would burn better, the packing go easier, the world be happier, if she could give and receive some human love.

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

We are reverting to the civilization of luggage, and historians of the future will note how the middle classes accreted possessions without taking root in the earth, and may find in this the secret of their imaginative poverty.