Quotes by E.M. Forster

When we were only acquaintances, you let me be myself, but now youre always protecting me... I wont be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. Cant I be trusted to face the truth but I must get it second-hand through you? A womans place!

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.

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

As for her hair, or rather hairs, they are too complicated to describe, but one system went down her back, lying in a thick pad there, while another, created for a lighter destiny, rippled around her forehead.

The novelist defines the story with the following example: If you are told that the king died and then the queen died, that is a sequence of events. If you were told that the king died and then the queen died of grief, that is a story that he was interested.

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.

Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul.

Night and day, wind and storm, tide and earthquake, impeded man no longer. He had harnessed Leviathan. All the old literature, with its praise of Nature, and its fear of Nature, rang false as the prattle of a child.

How can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in exile. The important towns they build are only retreats, their quarrels the malaise of men who cannot find their way home. India knows of their trouble. She knows of the whole worlds trouble, to its uttermost depth. She calls Come through her hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august. But come to what? She has never defined. She is not a promise, only an appeal.

Human beings have their great chance in the novel.

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

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.

It is the starved imagination, not the well-nourished, that is afraid.

He will work off his crudities in time. I rather mistrust young men who slip into life gracefully.

Men were not gods after all, but as human and as clumsy as girls.

The issues Miss Quested had raised were so much more important than she was herself that people inevitably forgot her.

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

It is not rubbish! It is the part of people that you do not understand.

She grew more and more vexed with his dignified behavior. By a cruel irony, she was drawing out what was best in his disposition.

As her time in Florence drew to a close she was only at ease amongst those to whom she felt indifferent.