E.M. Forster Quotes: 22

• 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.

  A Room with a View

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

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

• 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.

• 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.

  A Room with a View

• 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.

  A Room with a View

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

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

  A Room with a View

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

  Howards End

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

  A Room with a View

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

  Two Cheers for Democracy

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

  Maurice

• 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.

  Howards End

• We move between two darknesses.

  Aspects of the Novel

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

  Where Angels Fear to Tread

• 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. . .

  Maurice

• 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.

  Where Angels Fear to Tread

• 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.

  Howards End

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

  Aspects of the Novel

• 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.

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

  Where Angels Fear to Tread

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