E. M. Forster Quotes

"I knew you read the Symposium in the vac," he said in a low voice.
Maurice felt uneasy.
"Then you understand - without me saying more - "
"How do you mean?"
Durham could not wait. People were all around them, but with eyes that had gone intensely blue he whispered, "I love you."

You care for me a little bit, I do think, but I can't hang all my life on a little bit.

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

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. My 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.

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

Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterward.

Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.

I haven't made my point yet, which is that it is right to be kind and even sacrifice ourselves to people who need kindness and lie in our way — otherwise, besides failing to help them, we run into the aridity of self-development. To seek for recipients of one's goodness, to play the Potted Jesus leads to the contrary the Christian danger.

Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time - beautiful?

an Italian can never be ignored, least of all when he has a grievance.

Oh, Mr Hall, what an ungallant remark. Look at her lovely hair.'
'I like short hair best.'
'Why?'
'Because I can stroke it-' and he began to cry.

The contest lay not between love and duty. Perhaps there never is such a contest. It lay between the real and the pretended, and Lucy's first aim was to defeat herself.

You can do what you like, but the outcome will be the same.

Do you remember Italy?

The world is certainly full of beautiful things, if only I could come across them.