E.M. Forster Quotes

A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.

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.

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

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.

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

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

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.

He lived to near the things he loved to seem poetical.

The novelist defines the story with the following example: If you are told that the king died and then the queen died, that is a sequence of events. If you were told that the king died and then the queen died of grief, that is a story that he was interested.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

The advance of regret can be so gradual that it is impossible to say "yesterday I was happy, today I am not.