E.M. Forster Quotes

On Stranger Than Fiction, the script was so good that I stuck to every line because it was just such brilliant writing from Zach Helm that I felt like I really just want to shoot the page.

Life' wrote a friend of mine, 'is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.

Miss Abbott, don't worry over me. Some people are born not to do things. I'm one of them.

Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him.

While the Gods are powerful, we learn little about them. It is only in their day of decadence that a strong light beats into heaven.

Genius is the power of lighting one's own fire!

After all, is not a real Hell better than a manufactured Heaven?

He had awoken too late for happiness, but not for strength, and could feel an austere joy, as of a warrior who is homeless but stands fully armed.

How do I know what I think until I see what I say?

Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off, but opening out.

But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear and merge into something else.

And if insight were sufficient, if the inner life were the whole of life, their happiness has been assured.

we may say that History develops, Art stands still

Science explained people, but could not understand them.

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.

My father says that there is only one perfect view — the view of the sky straight over our heads, and that all these views on earth are but bungled copies of it.

There stood a young man who had the figure of a Greek athlete and the face of an English one...Just where he began to be beautiful the clothes started.

To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art.

If you introduce the human figure you at once arouse either disgust or desire.

I'm afraid that in nine cases out of ten Nature pulls one way and human nature another.

Either life entails courage or it ceases to be life.

All a child's life depends on the ideal it has of its parents. Destroy that and everything goes - morals, behavior, everything. Absolute trust in someone else is the essence of education.

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

He will work off his crudities in time. I rather mistrust young men who slip into life gracefully.

The issues Miss Quested had raised were so much more important than she was herself that people inevitably forgot her.

It is not rubbish! It is the part of people that you do not understand.

She grew more and more vexed with his dignified behavior. By a cruel irony, she was drawing out what was best in his disposition.

He lived on, miserable and misunderstood, as before, and increasingly lonely. One cannot write those words too often: Maurice’s loneliness: it increased.

The past is devoid of meaning like the present, and a refuge for cowards.

I think everyone fails, but there are so many kinds of failure.

There are different ways of evil and I prefer mine to yours.

Vashti was seized with the terrors of direct experience. She shrank back into the room, and the wall closed up again.

They had nothing in common but the English language, and tried by its help to express what neither of them understood.

How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?

A matter neither sensual nor sensational is ignored by the art of today.

Nothing ever happens to me, " she reflected..... An older person at such an hour and in such a place might think that sufficient was happening to him, and rest content. Lucy desired more.

But they did not chatter much, for the boy, when he liked a person, would as soon sit silent in his company as speak.

Love had failed. Love was an emotion through which you occasionally enjoyed yourself. it could not do things.

He was driven to use the prerogatives of his profession, to act the parson.

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 and hypocrisy.

They chose to regard it as a miraculous preservation.

I think the failure of The American church to affirm the goodness of civilizational life is our greatest failing today.

I swear from the bottom of my heart I want to be healed. I want to be like other men, not this outcast whom nobody wants.

Ladies sheltering behind men, men sheltering behind servants - the whole system's wrong, and she must challenge it.

The last seven weeks have been crap without you. All I wanted was to talk to you, see you again Kiss you.

The Machine stops.""What do you say?""The Machine is stopping, I know it, I know the signs."She burst into a peal of laugher.

We may still contrive to raise three cheers for democracy, although at present she only deserves two.

Too late... everything's always too late.

I rather mistrust young men who slip into life gracefully.

Oh, poor, poor fellow!' said Mrs. Elliot with a remorse that was sincere, though her congratulations would not have been.