Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?
E. M. FORSTERDo we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?
E. M. FORSTERThe 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.
E. M. FORSTERHave you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time – beautiful?
E. M. FORSTERIt was pleasant to wake up in Florence, to open the eyes upon a bright bare room, with a floor of red tiles which look clean though they are not; with a painted ceiling whereon pink griffins and blue amorini sport in a forest of yellow violins and bassoons.
E. M. FORSTERMost of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talks that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence.
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. FORSTERBooks have to be read it is the only way of discovering what they contain.
E. M. FORSTERThere is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.
E. M. FORSTERGive, do not lend; after death who will thank you?
E. M. FORSTERI won’t be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult.
E. M. FORSTERI distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man’s pleasure when they come a cropper.
E. M. FORSTERIt makes a difference doesn’t it, whether we fully fence ourselves in, or whether we are fenced out by the barriers of others?
E. M. FORSTERThere’s never any great risk as long as you have money.
E. M. FORSTERWe move between two darknesses.
E. M. FORSTEROnly a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.
E. M. FORSTERA poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
E. M. FORSTER