690 Quotes by E. M. Forster

He was interested in the sudden friendship between two women so apparently dissimilar as Miss Bartlett and Miss Lavish. They were always in each other’s company, with Lucy a slighted third. Miss Lavish he believed he understood, but Miss Bartlett might reveal unknown depths of strangeness, though not, perhaps, of meaning.

Standing each by his monster, they looked at each other, and smiled.

For the dead, who seem to take away so much, really take with them nothing that is ours. The passion they have aroused lives after them, easy to transmute or to transfer, but well-nigh impossible to destroy.

She watched the moon, whose radiance stained with primrose the purple of the surrounding sky. In England the moon had seemed dead and alien; here she was caught in the shawl of night together with earth and all the other stars.

Had he lived some centuries ago, in the brightly coloured civilizations of the past, he would have had a definite status, his rank and his income would have corresponded. But in his day the angel of Democracy had arisen, enshadowing the classes with leathern wings, and proclaiming, “All men are equal – all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas...

The ethereal past had blinded him, and the highest happiness he could dream was a return to it.

In Rome one had simply to sit still and feel.

An efficiency-regime cannot be run without a few heroes stuck about it to carry off the dullness – much as plums have to be put into bad pudding to make it palatable.

An engagement is so potent a thing that sooner or later it reduces all who speak of it to this state of cheerful awe.