E. M. Forster Quotes

There are different ways of evil and I prefer mine to yours.

Tulips were a tray of jewels.

There were letters for her at the bureau-one from her brother, full of athletics and biology; one from her mother, delightful as only mother's letters could be. She had read in it of the crocuses which had been bought for yellow and were coming up puce, of the new parlour-maid, who had watered the ferns with essence of lemonade...

People turned out to be alive. Hitherto he had supposed that they were what he pretended to be - flat pieces of cardboard stamped with a conventional design… there came by no process of reason a conviction that they were human beings with feelings akin to his own.

He longed for smut, but heard little and contributed less, and his chief indecencies were solitary.

Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off, but opening out.

A rebel she was, but not of the kind he understood - a rebel who desired, not a wider dwelling-room, but equality beside the man she loved. For Italy was offering her the most priceless of all possessions - her own soul.

Mr. Herriton, don’t – please, Mr. Herriton – a dentist. His father’s a dentist.”
Philip gave a cry of personal disgust and pain. He shuddered all over, and edged away from his companion. A dentist! A dentist at Monteriano. A dentist in fairyland! False teeth and laughing gas and the tilting chair at a place which knew the Etruscan League, and the Pax Romana, and Alaric himself, and the Countess Matilda, and the Middle Ages, all fighting and holiness, and the Renaissance, all fighting and beauty! He thought of Lilia no longer. He was anxious for himself: he feared that Romance might die.

She loved him absolutely, perhaps for half an hour.

Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.

And in time there will come a generation that has got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation seraphically free from taint of personality, which will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine.

The ends of the earth, the depths of the sea, the darkness of time, you have chosen all three.

Because I say so little you think I don't feel. I care a lot.

One can run away from women, turn them out, or give in to them. No fourth course.

It was unbearable, and he thought again, 'How unhappy I am!' and became happier.