E.M. Forster Quotes - Page 4

She stopped and leant her elbows against the parapet of the embankment. He did likewise. There is at times a magic in identity of position; it is one of the things that have suggested to us eternal comradeship.

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.

I'd far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children.

For a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and - by some sad, strange irony - it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy.

I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows.

The Waves is an extraordinary achievement ... It is trembling on the edge. A little less - and it would lose its poetry. A little more - and it would be over into the abyss, and be dull and arty. It is her greatest book.

There's never any great risk as long as you have money.

Human beings have their great chance in the novel.

But it was the stupidity of passion, which would rather have nothing than a little.

Sensual and spiritual are not easy words to use; that there are, perhaps, not two
Aphrodites, but one Aphrodite with a Janus face.

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

Men were not gods after all, but as human and as clumsy as girls.

You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried the other. "I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but not everything.

We move between two darknesses.