E. M. Forster Quotes
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She must be assured that it is not a criminal offense to love at first sight.
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It is now only in letters I write what I feel: not in literature any more, and I seldom say it, because I keep trying to be amusing.
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The sort of poetry I seek only resides in objects Man can't touch - like England 's grass network of lanes 100 years ago, but today he can destroy them and only Lord Farrer keeps him from doing it.
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Just as words have two functions - information and creation - so each human mind has two personalities, one on the surface, one deeper down. The upper personality... is conscious and alert... The lower personality is a... perfect fool, but without it there is no literature.
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The crime of suicide lies rather in its disregard for the feelings of those whom we leave behind.
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The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises it is flat. Flat characters ... in their purest form ... are constructed round a single idea or quality; when there is more than one factor to them, we get the beginning of the curve toward the round. The really flat character can be experessed in one sentence such as, "I will never desert Mr Micawber." There is Mrs Micawber - she says she won't desert Mr Micawber; she doesn't, and there she is.
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When love flies it is remembered not as love but as something else.
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The story of the Fall always fascinates me as a play ground, but I cannot find any profound meaning in it, because of my 'liberal' view of human nature: I cannot believe in a state of original innocence, still less in a profound meaning in it, and I am always minimising the conception and the extent of Sin and the sinfulness of sex.
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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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A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man.
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Love felt and returned, love which our bodies exact and our hearts have transfigured, love which is the most real thing that we shall ever meet, reappeared now as the world's enemy, and she must stifle it.
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It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness.
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It isn't possible to love and to part.
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I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place.
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People in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed.
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Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand.
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To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.
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The historian records, but the novelist creates.
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The hungry and the homeless don't care about liberty any more than they care about cultural heritage. To pretend that they do care is cant.
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I am so used to seeing the sort of play which deals with one man and two women. They do not leave me with the feeling I have made a full theatrical meal they do not give me the experience of the multiplicity of life.
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God is not Love in the East. He is Power, although Mercy may temper it.
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Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.
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Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.
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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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Ah, but you see, I didn't want to be fair.
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At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
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She loved him absolutely, perhaps for half an hour.
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It was pleasant to wake up in Florence, to open the eyes upon a bright bare room, with a floor of red tiles which look clean though they are not; with a painted ceiling whereon pink griffins and blue amorini sport in a forest of yellow violins and bassoons. It was pleasant, too, to fling wide the windows, pinching the fingers in unfamiliar fastenings, to lean out into sunshine with beautiful hills and trees and marble churches opposite, and, close below, Arno, gurgling against the embankment of the road.
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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.
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The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.
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