Em Forster Quotes

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.

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

How do I know what I think until I see what I say?

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.

Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

I am an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort.

You confuse what's important with what's impressive.

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.

Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.

Adventures do occur, but not punctually.

Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.

This desire to govern a woman—it lies very deep, and men and women must fight it together.... But I do love you surely in a better way than he does." He thought. "Yes—really in a better way. I want you to have your own thoughts even when I hold you in my arms.

Life' wrote a friend of mine, 'is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.

After all, is not a real Hell better than a manufactured Heaven?

You do care a little for me, I know... but nothing to speak of, and you don't love me. I was yours once till death if you'd cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now... and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked, and attend to your own happiness.

Did you ever dream you had a friend, Alec? Someone to last your whole life and you his. I suppose such a thing can’t really happen outside sleep.

Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate.

I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult.

A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense, Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.

I think you’re beautiful, the only beautiful person I’ve ever seen. I love your voice and everything to do with you, down to your clothes or the room you are sitting in. I adore you.

Only connect!

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.

Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him.

Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate. Adventures do occur, but not punctually.

It comes to this then: there always have been people like me and always will be, and generally they have been persecuted.

The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.

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

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.

While her lips talked culture, her heart was planning to invite him to tea

The house was very quiet, and the fog—we are in November now—pressed against the windows like an excluded ghost.

Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand.

... there are shadows because there are hills.

I swear from the bottom of my heart I want to be healed. I want to be like other men, not this outcast whom nobody wants.

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

I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.

No, he is not tactful, yet have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet, at the same time, beautiful?

It's not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts.

If we act the truth the people who really love us are sure to come back to us in the long run

She only felt that the candle would burn better, the packing go easier, the world be happier, if she could give and receive some human love.

Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?

Passion should believe itself irresistible. It should forget civility and consideration and all the other curses of a refined nature. Above all, it should never ask for leave where there is a right of way.

There's enough sorrow in the world, isn't there, without trying to invent it.

A humanist has four leading characteristics - curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.

All a child's life depends on the ideal it has of its parents. Destroy that and everything goes - morals, behavior, everything. Absolute trust in someone else is the essence of education.

At times our need for a sympathetic gesture is so great that we care not what exactly it signifies or how much we may have to pay for it afterwards.

One doesn't come to Italy for niceness," was the retort; "one comes for life. Buon giorno! Buon giorno!

Don't go fighting against the Spring.

...though nothing is damaged, everything is changed.

I do like Christmas on the whole.... In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But it is clumsier every year.

When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.

There has been, is, and always will be every conceivable type of person.  

Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time). It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West.

Don't be mysterious; there isn't the time.

But it struck him that people are not really dead until they are felt to be dead. As long as there is some misunderstanding about them, they possess a sort of immortality.

They had nothing in common but the English language.

Words deserted him immediately. He could only speak when he was not asked to.

Of course he despised the world as a whole; every thoughtful man should; it is almost a test of refinement.

I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.

... And now we shan't be parted no more, and that's finished.

She loved him absolutely, perhaps for half an hour.

To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it.

I was yours once 'till death if you'd cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now - I can't hang about whining forever - and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked, and attend to your own happiness?

A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man.

I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's.

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.

At times he entertained the dream. Two men can defy the world.

Why children?' he asked. 'Why always children? For love to end where it begins is far more beautiful, and Nature knows it.

The crime of suicide lies rather in its disregard for the feelings of those whom we leave behind.

I suppose I shall have to live now

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

I should have gone through life half awake if you'd had the decency to leave me alone. Awake intellectually, yes, and emotionally in a way; but here--" He pointed with his pipe stem to his heart; and both smiled. "Perhaps we woke up one another. I like to think that anyway.

He knew that loneliness was poisoning him, so that he grew viler as well as more unhappy.

I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows.

You told me once that we shall be judged by our intentions, not by our accomplishments. I thought it a grand remark. But we must intend to accomplish—not sit intending on a chair.

The advance of regret can be so gradual that it is impossible to say "yesterday I was happy, today I am not.

All men are equal - all men, that is, who possess umbrellas.

It isn’t possible to love and to 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.

Nothing's the same for anyone. That's why life's this Hell, if you do a thing you're damned, and if you don't you're damned . . . .

You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried the other. "I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but not everything.

It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die--neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave.

The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.

She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. 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.

Then she lay on her back and gazed at the cloudless sky. Mr. Beebe, whose opinion of her rose daily, whispered to his niece that that was the proper way to behave if any little thing went wrong.

He educated Maurice, or rather his spirit educated Maurice's spirit, for they themselves became equal. Neither thought "Am I led; am I leading?" Love had caught him out of triviality and Maurice out of bewilderment in order that two imperfect souls might touch perfection.

When love flies it is remembered not as love but as something else. Blessed are the uneducated, who forget it entirely, and are never conscious of folly or pruriency in the past, of long aimless conversations.

There was something better in life than this rub­bish, if only he could get to it—love—nobility—big spaces where passion clasped peace, spaces no science could reach, but they existed for ever, full of woods some of them, and arched with majestic sky and a friend. . .

The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom.

It was not that ladies were inferior to men; it was that they were different. Their mission was to inspire others to achievement rather than to achieve themselves. Indirectly, by means of tact and a spotless name, a lady could accomplish much. But if she rushed into the fray herself she would be first censured, then despised, and finally ignored.

I believe in aristocracy, though -- if that is the right word, and if a democrat may use it. Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secreat understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos. Thousands of them perish in obscurity, a few are great names. They are sensitive for others as well as themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but power to endure, and they can take a joke.

Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence. Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend. There 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. 'As far as I feel anything, it is enjoyment, horror' - it's no more than that really, and a perfectly adjusted organism would be silent.

There is only a certain amount of kindness in the world…just as there is a certain amount of light. We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things…Choose a place where you won’t do very much harm and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.

What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives? They have never entered into mine, but into yours, we thought--Haven't we all to struggle against life's daily greyness, against pettiness, against mechanical cheerfulness, against suspicion? I struggle by remembering my friends; others I have known by remembering some place--some beloved place or tree--we thought you one of these.

Why can't we be friends now?" said the other, holding him affectionately. "It's what I want. It's what you want." But the horses didn't want it — they swerved apart: the earth didn't want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temple, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they emerged from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn't want it, they said in their hundred voices "No, not yet," and the sky said "No, not there.

She gave up trying to understand herself, and the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words. The armies are full of pleasant and pious folk. But they have yielded to the only enemy that matters — the enemy within. They have sinned against passion and truth, and vain will be their strife after virtue. As the years pass, they are censured. Their pleasantry and their piety show cracks, their wit becomes cynicism, their unselfishness hypocrisy; they feel and produce discomfort wherever they go.

Was Mrs. Wilcox one of the unsatisfactory people- there are many of them- who dangle intimacy and then withdraw it? They evoke our interests and affections, and keep the life of the spirit dawdling around them. Then they withdraw. When physical passion is involved, there is a definite name for such behaviour- flirting- and if carried far enough, it is punishable by law. But no law- not public opinion, even- punishes those who coquette with friendship, though the dull ache that they inflict, the sense of misdirected effort and exhaustion, may be as intolerable. Was she one of these?

Margaret realized the chaotic nature of our daily life, and its difference from the orderly sequence that has been fabricated by historians. Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes. The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is no that of a man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken. On a tragedy of that kind our national morality is duly silent. It assumes that preparation against danger is in itself a good, and that men, like nations, are the better for staggering through life fully armed. The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.