690 Quotes by E. M. Forster

Things that are indelicate can sometimes be beautiful.

Do you suppose there’s any difference between spring in nature and spring in man? But there we go, praising the one and condemning the other as improper, ashamed that the same laws work eternally through both.

The idealism and the brutality that ran through boyhood had joined at last, and twined into love.

Like his sister and like most young people, he was naturally attracted by the idea of equality, and the undeniable fact that there are different kinds of Emersons annoyed him beyond measure.

But I have seen my obstacles: trivialities, learning and poetry. This last needs explaining: the old artist’s readiness to dissolve characters into a haze. Characters cannot come alive and fight and guide the world unless the novelist wants them to remain characters.

The affections are more reticent than the passions, and their expression more subtle.

He doesn’t want you to be real, and to think and to live. He doesn’t love you. But I love you. I want you to have your own thoughts and ideas and feelings, even when I hold you in my arms.

The Waves is an extraordinary achievement... It is trembling on the edge. A little less – and it would lose its poetry. A little more – and it would be over into the abyss, and be dull and arty. It is her greatest book.

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