For it is a serious thing to have been watched. We all radiate something curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone.
E. M. FORSTERFor it is a serious thing to have been watched. We all radiate something curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone.
E. M. FORSTERWhat is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
E. M. FORSTERThough life is very glorious, it is difficult.
E. M. FORSTERIt 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.
E. M. FORSTERAt night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
E. M. FORSTERThe kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world.
E. M. FORSTERLet 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.
E. M. FORSTERThink before you speak is criticism’s motto; speak before you think, creation’s.
E. M. FORSTERLife is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t’other from which . . .
E. M. FORSTERMy temple stands not upon Mount Moriah but in the Elysian Field where even the immoral are admitted. My motto is ‘Lord, I disbelieve – help thou my unbelief.
E. M. FORSTEROnly a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.
E. M. FORSTERThere is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.
E. M. FORSTEROutside the arch, always there seemed another arch. And beyond the remotest echo, a silence.
E. M. FORSTERThere are periods in the most thrilling day during which nothing happens, and though we continue to exclaim, “I do enjoy myself”, or , “I am horrified,” we are insincere.
E. M. FORSTERHuman relations are impossible. When they are real they are uncomfortable, and when they are comfortable they are unreal. It was for the journey into solitude that the human soul was created.
E. M. FORSTERSo 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.
E. M. FORSTER