E.M. Forster Quotes

But the body is deeper than the soul and its secrets inscrutable.

We move between two darknesses.

I'd far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children.

Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.

Italy and London are the only places where I don't feel to exist on sufferance.

Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.

Some reviews give pain. This is regrettable, but no author has the right to whine. He was not obliged to be an author. He invited publicity, and he must take the publicity that comes along.

There's never any great risk as long as you have money.

It comes to this then: there always have been people like me and always will be, and generally they have been persecuted.

The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.

I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.

Don't be mysterious; there isn't the time.

One has two duties - to be worried and not to be worried.

. . . life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t'other from which . . .

There are moments when the inner life actually 'pays,' when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use.

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.

England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.

Man can learn everything if he will but try.

The people I admire most are those who are sensitive and want to create something or discover something, and do not see life in terms of power.

I have always found writing pleasant and don't understand what people mean by 'throes of creation.'

The sun was already declining and each of the trees held a premonition of night.

The bully and his victim never quite forget their first relations.

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.

Why children?' he asked. 'Why always children? For love to end where it begins is far more beautiful, and Nature knows it.

For you cannot have gentility without paying for it.

I hated the idleness, the stupidity, the respectability, the petty unselfishness.

If only the sense of actuality can be lulled-and it sleeps for ever in most historians-there is no passion that cannot be gratified in the past.

The so called white races are really pinko-grey.

But after all, what have we to do with taverns? Real menace belongs to the drawing-room.

Pity wraps the student of the past in an ambrosial cloud, and washes his limbs with eternal youth.

The strong are so stupid.

It is devilish difficult to criticise society & also create human beings.

God is not Love in the East. He is Power, although Mercy may temper it.

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.

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.

Those who search for truth are too conscious of the maze to be hard on others...

I don't know what to think until I see what I've said.

How do I know what I have to say wntil I see what I have said?

Belfastas uncivilised as ever--savage black mothers in houses of dark red brick, friendly manufacturers too drunk to entertain you when you arrive. It amuses me till I get tired.

The middle age of buggers is not to be contemplated without horror.

Sudden conversion ... is particularly attractive to the half-baked mind.

Growing old is an emotion which comes over us at almost any age; I had it myself between the ages of 25 and 30.

I'm a holy man minus the holiness. Hand that on to your three spies, and tell them to put it in their pipes.

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.

Ah, but you see, I didn't want to be fair.

The book [ A Passage to India ] shows signs of fatigue and disillusionment; but it has chapters of clear and triumphant beauty, and above all it makes us wonder, what will he write next?

One can run away from women, turn them out, or give in to them. No fourth course.

Self-pity? I see no moral objections to it, the smell drives people away, but that's a practical objection, and occasionally an advantage.

Freedom does not guarantee masterpieces.

It is the starved imagination, not the well nourished, that is afraid.