690 Quotes by E. M. Forster

A matter neither sensual nor sensational is ignored by the art of today.

People never touched one another. The custom had become obsolete, owing to the Machine.

Beautiful?” said Miss Bartlett, puzzled at the word. “Are not beauty and delicacy the same?

No doubt his wife and children were beautiful too, for people usually get what they already possess.

We are all like Scheherazade’s husband, in that we want to know what happens next.

He never did his dumb-bells or played in his school fifteen. But the muscles came. He thinks they came while he was reading Pindar.

Belfastas uncivilised as ever – savage black mothers in houses of dark red brick, friendly manufacturers too drunk to entertain you when you arrive. It amuses me till I get tired.

And that is why novels, even when they are about wicked people, can solace us: they suggest a more comprehensible and thus more manageable human race, they give us the illusion of perspicacity and of power.

I rather mistrust young men who slip into life gracefully.