E. M. Forster Quotes
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Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.
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I only wish the poets would say this too: love is of the body; not the body, but of the the body. Ah! the misery that would be saved if we confessed that! Ah! for a little directness to liberate the soul!
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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 . . . .
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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.
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I am the means and not the end. I am the food and not the life. Stand by yourself, as that boy has stood. I cannot save you. For poetry is a spirit; and they that would worship it must worship in spirit and in truth.
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Laughing at mankind is rather weary rot, I think. We shall never meet with anyone nicer. Nature, whom I used to be keen on, is too unfair. She evokes plenty of high & exhausting feelings, and offers nothing in return.
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Pathos, piety, courage, - they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.
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As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take the examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one be a penny the stupider.
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There is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.
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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.
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I enjoy French poetry as well as French prose, and I believe that this land must have some cultural connection with the European continent, and that she is best connected through her spiritual complement across the Straits of Dover.
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What the world most needs today are negative virtues - not minding people, not being huffy, touchy, irritable or revengeful.
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Then she lay on her back and gazed at the cloudless sky. Mr. Beebe, whose opinion of her rose daily, whispered to his niece that that was the proper way to behave if any little thing went wrong.
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If God could tell the story of the Universe, the Universe would become fictitious.
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Ulysses ... is a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud, an inverted Victorianism, an attempt to make crossness and dirt succeed where sweetness and light failed, a simplification of the human character in the interests of Hell.
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I have said that each aspect of the novel demands a different quality of the reader. Well, the prophetic aspect demands two qualities: humility and the suspension of the sense of humour.
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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.
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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.
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The advance of regret can be so gradual that it is impossible to say "yesterday I was happy, today I am not.
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One grows accustomed to being praised, or being blamed, or being advised, but it is unusual to be understood.
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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.
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An efficiency-regime cannot be run without a few heroes stuck about it to carry off the dullness - much as plums have to be put into bad pudding to make it palatable.
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But this time I'm not to blame; I want you to believe that. I simply slipped into those violets. No, I want to be really truthful. I am a little to blame. The sky, you know, was gold, and the ground all blue, and for a moment he looked like some one in a book.
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The novelist, unlike many of his colleagues, makes up a number of word-masses roughly describing himself (roughly: niceties shallcome later), gives them names and sex, assigns them plausible gestures, and causes them to speak by the use of inverted commas, and perhaps to behave consistently.