E.M. Forster Quotes - Page 2

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

This desire to govern a woman - it lies very deep, and men and women must fight it together.... But I do love you surely in a better way then he does." He thought. "Yes - really in a better way. I want you to have your own thoughts even when I hold you in my arms.

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.

I knew you read the Symposium in the vac," he said in a low voice.
Maurice felt uneasy.
"Then you understand - without me saying more - "
"How do you mean?"
Durham could not wait. People were all around them, but with eyes that had gone intensely blue he whispered, "I love you.

I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's.

Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.

There was something better in life than this rub­bish, if only he could get to it - love - nobility - big spaces where passion clasped peace, spaces no science could reach, but they existed for ever, full of woods some of them, and arched with majestic sky and a friend. . .

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

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

Books have to be read (worse luck, for it takes a long time); it is the only way of discovering what they contain.

School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible.

The Arts are not drugs. They are not guaranteed to act when taken. Something as mysterious and capricious as the creative impulse has to be released before they can act.

He had known so much about her once -what she thought, how she felt, the reasons for her actions. And now he only knew that he loved her, and all the other knowledge seemed passing from him just as he needed it most.

He educated Maurice, or rather his spirit educated Maurice's spirit, for they themselves became equal. Neither thought "Am I led; am I leading?" Love had caught him out of triviality and Maurice out of bewilderment in order that two imperfect souls might touch perfection.

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

Science explained people, but could not understand them.

Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.

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.

A book is a mirror; if an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to peer out.

One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister.