690 Quotes by E. M. Forster

The contest lay not between love and duty. Perhaps there never is such a contest. It lay between the real and the pretended, and Lucy’s first aim was to defeat herself.

I seem fated to pass through the world without colliding with it or moving it – and I’m sure I can’t tell you whether the fate’s good or evil. I don’t die – I don’t fall in love. And if other people die or fall in love they always do it when I’m just not there.

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.

There are moments when the inner life actually ‘pays,’ when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use.

But this time I’m not to blame; I want you to believe that. I simply slipped into those violets. No, I want to be really truthful. I am a little to blame. The sky, you know, was gold, and the ground all blue, and for a moment he looked like some one in a book.

What the world most needs today are negative virtues – not minding people, not being huffy, touchy, irritable or revengeful.

She was appallingly narrow, but her consciousness of wider things gave to her narrowness a pathetic charm.

The woman who can’t influence her husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herself.

Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. We move between two darkness’s.