E.M. 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.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.”
― E.M. Forster

“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”
― E.M. Forster

“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.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“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.”
― E.M. Forster

“We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”
― E.M. Forster

“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.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room With A View

“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”
― E.M. Forster, What I Believe and Other Essays

“I am an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“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.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“You confuse what's important with what's impressive.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“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.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“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, A Room with a View

“Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.”
― E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

“Adventures do occur, but not punctually.”
― E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

“Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“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.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“Life' wrote a friend of mine, 'is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“After all, is not a real Hell better than a manufactured Heaven?”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“It is fate that I am here,' George persisted, 'but you can call it Italy if it makes you less unhappy.”
― E. M. Forster, A Room with a View

“Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer.”
― E. M. Forster, Howards End

“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.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate.”
― E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

“I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult.”
― E.M. Forster

“It is so difficult - at least, I find it difficult - to understand people who speak the truth.”
― E. M. Forster, A Room with a View

“By the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes--a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.”
― E. M. Forster, A Room with a View

“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.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“Only connect!”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“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.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End