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E.M. Forster QUOTES

1 " It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal. "

― E.M. Forster , A Room with a View

2 " We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine. "

― E.M. Forster , A Room with a View

3 " The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death. "

― E.M. Forster

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

― E.M. Forster , A Room with a View

5 " Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon. "

― E.M. Forster

6 " If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country. "

― E.M. Forster ,

7 " Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it. "

― E.M. Forster , Howards End

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

― E.M. Forster , Where Angels Fear to Tread

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

― E.M. Forster , Howards End

10 " She gave up trying to understand herself, and the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words. The armies are full of pleasant and pious folk. But they have yielded to the only enemy that matters — the enemy within. They have sinned against passion and truth, and vain will be their strife after virtue. As the years pass, they are censured. Their pleasantry and their piety show cracks, their wit becomes cynicism, their unselfishness hypocrisy; they feel and produce discomfort wherever they go. "

― E.M. Forster , A Room with a View

E.M. Forster QUOTES

11 " It is so difficult - at least, I find it difficult - to understand people who speak the truth. "

― E.M. Forster , A Room with a View

12 " We reach in desperation beyond the fog, beyond the very stars, the voids of the universe are ransacked to justify the monster, and stamped with a human face. London is religions opportunity--not the decorous religion of theologians, but an anthropomorphic, crude. Yes, the continuous flow would be tolerable if a man of our own sort--not anyone pompous or tearful--were caring for us up in the sky. "

― E.M. Forster , Howards End

13 " 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. "

― E.M. Forster , Howards End

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

― E.M. Forster , Maurice

15 " 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. "

― E.M. Forster , Maurice

16 " They must live outside class, without relations or money; they must work and stick to each other till death. But England belonged to them. That, besides companionship, was their reward. Her air and sky were theirs, not the timorous millions' who own stuffy little boxes, but never their own souls. "

― E.M. Forster , Maurice

17 " I was yours once till death if you cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now--I can't hang about whining for ever--and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked and attend to your own happiness? "

― E.M. Forster

18 " 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. "

― E.M. Forster , Howards End

19 " George had turned at the sound of her arrival. For a moment he contemplated her, as one who had fallen out of heaven. He saw radiant joy in her face, he saw the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves. The bushes above them closed. He stepped quickly forward and kissed her.
Before she could speak, almost before she could feel, a voice called 'Lucy! Lucy! Lucy!' The silence of life had been broken by Miss Bartlett, who stood brown against the view. "

― E.M. Forster , A Room with a View

20 " Eccolo!” he exclaimed.

At the same moment the ground gave way, and with a cry she fell out of the wood. Light and beauty enveloped her. She had fallen on to a little open terrace, which was covered with violets from end to end.

“Courage!” cried her companion, now standing some six feet above. “Courage and love.”

She did not answer. From her feet the ground sloped sharply into view, and violets ran down in rivulets and streams and cataracts, irrigating the hillside with blue, eddying round the tree stems, collecting into pools in the hollows, covering the grass with spots of azure foam. But never again were they in such profusion; this terrace was the well-head, the primal source whence beauty gushed out to water the earth.

Standing at its brink, like a swimmer who prepares, was the good man. But he was not the good man that she had expected, and he was alone.

George had turned at the sound of her arrival. For a moment he contemplated her, as one who had fallen out of heaven. He saw radiant joy in her face, he saw the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves. The bushes above them closed. He stepped quickly forward and kissed her… "

― E.M. Forster , A Room with a View