The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.
E. M. FORSTERI believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them. It’s one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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Sometimes I think too much fuss is made about marriage. Century after century of carnal embracement and we’re still no nearer to understanding one another.
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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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It is easy to sympathize at a distance,’ said an old gentleman with a beard. ‘I value more the kind word that is spoken close to my ear.
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I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.
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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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It isn’t possible to love and to part.
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At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
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How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
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I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.
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Money pads the edges of things.
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Don’t be mysterious; there isn’t the time.
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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.
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Unless we remember we cannot understand.
E. M. FORSTER -
I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them. It’s one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place.
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Though life is very glorious, it is difficult.
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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A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
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One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.
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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.
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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.
E. M. FORSTER -
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.
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Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.
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Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
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The emotions may be endless. The more we express them, the more we may have to express.
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I can only do what’s easy. I can only entice and be enticed. I can’t, and won’t, attempt difficult relations. If I marry it will either be a man who’s strong enough to boss me or whom I’m strong enough to boss.
E. M. FORSTER -
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.
E. M. FORSTER