E. M. Forster Quotes
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Aziz winked at him slowly and said: “...There are many ways of being a man; mine is to express what is deepest in my heart.
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When we were only acquaintances, you let me be myself, but now you're always protecting me... I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. Can't I be trusted to face the truth but I must get it second-hand through you? A woman's place!
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Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time). It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West.
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Self-pity? I see no moral objections to it, the smell drives people away, but that's a practical objection, and occasionally an advantage.
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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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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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Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still entangled with the desire for ownership.
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Like all her friends, I miss her greatly...But...I am sure there is no case for lamentation...Virginia Woolf got through an immense amount of work, she gave acute pleasure in new ways, she pushed the light of the English language a little further against darkness. Those are facts.
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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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...the true spirit of gastronomic joylessness. Porridge fills the Englishman up, and prunes clear him out.
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Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties. You will have noticed in daily life that when people are inquisitive they nearly always have bad memories and are usually stupid at bottom.
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In the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life.
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The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken.
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As her time in Florence drew to a close she was only at ease amongst those to whom she felt indifferent.
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It is not that the Englishman can't feel-it is that he is afraid to feel. He has been taught at his public school that feeling is bad form. He must not express great joy or sorrow, or even open his mouth too wide when he talks-his pipe might fall out if he did.
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All a child's life depends on the ideal it has of its parents. Destroy that and everything goes — morals, behaviour, everything. Absolute trust in some one else is the essence of education.
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Growing old is an emotion which comes over us at almost any age; I had it myself between the ages of 25 and 30.
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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.
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Humility is a quality for which I have only a limited admiration. In many phases of life it is a great mistake and degenerates into defensiveness or hypocrisy.
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Dead silence ensued, which was well enough for Ansell, to whom it merely meant that neither of us had any more to say. But to educated people silence matters; it is a token of stupidity and lack of invention.
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Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form.
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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.
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An acquaintance had become a lover, might become a husband, but would retain all that she had noted in the acquaintance; and love must confirm an old relation rather than reveal a new one.
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I am actually what my age and my upbringing have made me - a bourgeois who adheres to the British constitution, adheres to it rather than supports it, and the fact that this isn't dignified doesn't worry me.