Don’t begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed.
E. M. FORSTERShe had been so wicked that in all her life she had done only one good deed-given an onion to a beggar. So she went to hell. As she lay in torment she saw the onion, lowered down from heaven by an angel. She caught hold of it. He began to pull her up.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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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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It is so difficult – at least, I find it difficult – to understand people who speak the truth.
E. M. FORSTER -
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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If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
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But the body is deeper than the soul and its secrets inscrutable.
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She had been so wicked that in all her life she had done only one good deed-given an onion to a beggar. So she went to hell. As she lay in torment she saw the onion, lowered down from heaven by an angel. She caught hold of it. He began to pull her up.
E. M. FORSTER -
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
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When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.
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Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
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So I shan’t ever marry, for there aren’t such men. And Heaven help any one whom I do marry, for I shall certainly run away from him before you can say ‘Jack Robinson.
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Think before you speak is criticism’s motto; speak before you think, creation’s.
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Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
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Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time – beautiful?
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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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Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. I do not believe in it, for its own sake, at all… My lawgivers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul.
E. M. FORSTER






