E. M. Forster Quotes
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Towns are after all excrescences, grey fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.
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. . . life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t'other from which . . .
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‘Why are pictures like this allowed?’ he suddenly cried. He had stopped in front of a colonial print in which the martyrdom of St Agatha was depicted with all the fervour that incompetence could command.‘It’s only a saint,’ said Lady Peaslake, placidly raising her head.‘How disgusting – and how ugly’‘Yes, very. It’s Roman Catholic.’
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The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.
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How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
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N.B. this book and pensées not important and the temptation to mistake them for Creation must be resisted.
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Naked I came into this world, naked I shall go out of it. And a very good thing too, for it reminds me that I am naked under my shirt, whatever its colour.
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We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.
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They go forth [into the world] with well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds and undeveloped hearts. An undeveloped heart - not a cold one. The difference is important.
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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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But I have seen my obstacles: trivialities, learning and poetry. This last needs explaining: the old artist's readiness to dissolve characters into a haze. Characters cannot come alive and fight and guide the world unless the novelist wants them to remain characters.
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A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
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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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Probable that I am now better than most people and as good as I ever shall be at this game, and can therefore get to know anyone I wish, provided I am not physically repellent. And perhaps this is why personal relationships no longer seem to me a serious branch of study.
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The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.
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But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else.
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Ideas are fatal to caste.
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Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.
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Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.
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But that was only the beginning of her mortification. Harold had proved her wrong. He had seen that she was a shifty, shallow hypocrite. She had not dared to be alone with him since her exposure. She had never looked at him and had hardly spoken. He seemed cheerful, but what was he thinking? He would never forgive her.
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One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
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We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.
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I don't think literature will be purged until its philosophic pretentiousness is extruded, and I shant live to see that purge, nor perhaps when it has happened will anything survive.
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Tolerance is just a makeshift, suitable for an overcrowded and overheated planet. It carries on when love gives out, and love generally gives out as soon as we move away from our home and our friends.