E. M. Forster Quotes
-
He was obliged however to throw over Christianity. Those who base their conduct upon what they are rather than upon what they ought to be, always must throw it over in the end . . . .
-
There's nothing like a debate to teach one quickness. I often wish I had gone in for them when I was a youngster. It would have helped me no end.
-
Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wants to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.
-
Axiom: Novel must have either one living character or a perfect pattern: fails otherwise.
-
Science, when applied to personal relationships, is always just wrong.
-
When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.
-
One grows accustomed to being praised, or being blamed, or being advised, but it is unusual to be understood.
-
One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
-
Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I am so used to seeing the sort of play which deals with one man and two women. They do not leave me with the feeling I have made a full theatrical meal they do not give me the experience of the multiplicity of life.
-
Our easiest approach to a definition of any aspect of fiction is always by considering the sort of demand it makes on the reader. Curiosity for the story, human feelings and a sense of value for the characters, intelligence and memory for the plot. What does fantasy ask of us? It asks us to pay something extra.
-
All this fame and money, which have so thrilled me when they came to others, leave me cold when they come to me. I am not an ascetic, but I don't know what to do with them, and my daily life has never been so trying, and there is no one to fill it emotionally.
-
Sometimes I think too much fuss is made about marriage. Century after century of carnal embracement and we're still no nearer to understanding one another.
-
We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.
-
It is so difficult – at least, I find it difficult – to understand people who speak the truth.
-
Personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever and not this outer life of telegrams and anger.
-
A mirror does not develop because an historical pageant passes in front of it. It only develops when it gets a fresh coat of quicksilver - in other words, when it acquires new sensitiveness; and the novel's success lies in its own sensitiveness, not in the success of its subject matter.
-
I had an interesting day's reading yesterday, with the sudden sensation of being in close contact with what I was reading. ... But as for reading how curious it is: all these books, their lore of the ages, waiting to be embraced but usually slipping out of one's nerveless hands on to the floor. When one reads properly it is as if a third person is present.
-
The traveller who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or the corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it.
-
No disease of the imagination is so difficult to cure, as that which is complicated with the dread of guilt: fancy and conscience then act interchangeably upon us, and so often shift their places, that the illusions of one are not distinguished from the dictates of the other.
-
Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence.
-
I haven't made my point yet, which is that it is right to be kind and even sacrifice ourselves to people who need kindness and lie in our way - otherwise, besides failing to help them, we run into the aridity of self-development. To seek for recipients of one's goodness, to play the Potted Jesus leads to the contrary the Christian danger.