It makes a difference doesn't it, whether we fully fence ourselves in, or whether we are fenced out by the barriers of others?
E. M. ForsterRead
115 quotes
Are not beauty and delicacy the same?
E. M. ForsterRead
Romance only dies with life. No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of us. But there is a spurious sentiment which cannot resist the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque. A touch will loosen it, and the sooner it goes from us the better.
E. M. ForsterRead
Do not be proud of your inconsistency. It is a pity, it is a pity that we should be equipped like this. It is a pity that Man cannot be at the same time impressive and truthful.
E. M. ForsterRead
'Oh, poor, poor fellow!' said Mrs. Elliot with a remorse that was sincere, though her congratulations would not have been.
E. M. ForsterRead
In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences and out of the mixture he makes a work of art.
E. M. ForsterRead
Chess is a forcing house where the fruits of character can ripen more fully than in life
E. M. ForsterRead
A novel must give a sense of permanence as well as a sense of life.
E. M. ForsterRead
Towns are after all excrescences, grey fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.
E. M. ForsterRead
Expansion, that is the idea the novelist must cling to, not completion, not rounding off, but opening out.
E. M. ForsterRead
Words deserted him immediately. He could only speak when he was not asked to.
E. M. ForsterRead
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.
E. M. ForsterRead
When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.
E. M. ForsterRead
At the moment they vanished they were everywhere, the cool benediction of the night descended, the stars sparkled, and the whole universe was a hill.
E. M. ForsterRead
Aziz winked at him slowly and said: “...There are many ways of being a man; mine is to express what is deepest in my heart.
E. M. ForsterRead
It so happened that Lucy, who found daily life rather chaotic, entered a more solid world when she opened the piano. She was then no longer either deferential or patronizing; no longer either a rebel or a slave.
E. M. ForsterRead
Human beings have their great chance in the novel.
E. M. ForsterRead
When love flies it is remembered not as love but as something else.
E. M. ForsterRead
The advance of regret can be so gradual that it is impossible to say "yesterday I was happy, today I am not.
E. M. ForsterRead
A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense, Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.
E. M. ForsterRead
I'd far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children.
E. M. ForsterRead