E. M. Forster Quotes
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Your letter firmed me up a lot. It certainly is a comfort to know that my work is respected by someone whom I respect and am as fond as you. It confirms my beliefe that life is notall nonsense and cruelty-the inversion of Victorian complacency-but has hard spots of sense and love bobbing about in it here and there.
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America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for. It will probably be interesting, and it is sure to be large.
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Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work.
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It isn’t possible to love and to 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 from experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.
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Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.
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What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?
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There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.
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Love felt and returned, love which our bodies exact and our hearts have transfigured, love which is the most real thing that we shall ever meet, reappeared now as the world's enemy, and she must stifle it.
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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. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.
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Pain is good, I'd say, when it's incidental to Love. In 'I give up my life for my friend' it is my friend, not my death, that matters. And sometimes I needn't give up my life for him, I can live for him, and with him, and the power of the spirit is then equally manifested, I should think.
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It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals, and perhaps this is why history is so attractive to the more timid among us. We can recover self-confidence by snubbing the dead.
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Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.
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All invitations must proceed from heaven perhaps; perhaps it is futile for men to initiate their own unity, they do but widen the gulfs between them by the attempt.
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No one is India.
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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.
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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.
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We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
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The story of the Fall always fascinates me as a play ground, but I cannot find any profound meaning in it, because of my 'liberal' view of human nature: I cannot believe in a state of original innocence, still less in a profound meaning in it, and I am always minimising the conception and the extent of Sin and the sinfulness of sex.
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Peacefulness to be found in writing. Why do I not write every day? Partly because I feel I ought to write well and know I can't. But that is not a good enough reason for not writing, if it gains me poise & peace.
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Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration.
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The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.
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We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.
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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.
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This element of surprise or mystery the detective element as it is sometimes rather emptily called is of great importance in a plot.