Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element – direct observation. Do not learn anything about this subject of mine – the French Revolution. Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho-Yung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought Lafcadio Hearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution.

— E. M. Forster

E. M. Forster Quotes

I foresaw at Florence that her quiet, uneventful childhood must end, and it has ended. I realised dimly enough that she might take some momentous steps. She has taken it. She has learned – you will let me talk freely, as I have begun freely – she has learned what it is to love: the greatest lesson, some people will tell you, that our earthly life provides. She has learned through you.

— E.M. Forster

Nothing that can stop you retreating into splendour and beauty – into the thoughts and beliefs that make the real life – the real you.

— E.M. Forster

Don’t act. Or act better.

— E.M. Forster

It is well to be remembered with love. It is not so very dreadful to be forgotten entirely. But if we shall resent anything on earth at all, we shall resent the consecration of a deserted room.

— E.M. Forster

The horrible truth, that wicked people are capable of love, stood naked before her, and her moral being was abashed.

— E.M. Forster

And so with the mouldy artificial fruit, so with the bath water that began to stink, so with the defective rhymes that the poetry machine had taken to emit. All were bitterly complained of at first, and then acquiesced in and forgotten. Things went from bad to worse unchallenged. It was otherwise with the failure of the sleeping apparatus. That was a more serious stoppage.

— E.M. Forster

To such a height was he lifted, that without regret he could now have told her that he was her worshipper too. But what was the use of telling her? For all the wonderful things had happened.

— E.M. Forster

The melody rose, unprofitably magical. It broke; it was resumed broken, not marching once from the cradle to the grave. The sadness of the incomplete – the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art – throbbed in its disjected phrases, and made the nerves of the audience throb.

— E.M. Forster

How can we return to Nature when we have never been with her?

— E.M. Forster

It is Fate that I am here,’ persisted George. ‘But you can call it Italy if it makes you less unhappy.

— E.M. Forster

He looked at her as she stood by the pool’s edge. She was got up smart, as she phrased it, and she reminded him of some brilliant flower that has no leaves of its own, but blooms abruptly out of a world of green.

— E.M. Forster

You have each other and all these woods to walk in, so full of beautiful things; and poor Charlotte has only the water turned off and plumbers. You are young, dears, and however clever young people are, and however many books they read, they will never guess what it feels like to grow old.

— E.M. Forster

His voice moved her deeply, and she wished to remain near him. How dreadful if she really wished to remain near him!

— E.M. Forster

She frowns a little – not in anger, but as a brave child frowns when he is trying not to cry.

— E.M. Forster

Perhaps anything that he did would have pleased Lucy, but his awkwardness went straight to her heart: men were not gods after all, but as human and as clumsy as girls; even men might suffer from unexplained desires, and need help. To one of her upbringing, and of her destination, the weakness of men was a truth unfamiliar, but she had surmised it at Florence, when George threw her photographs into the river Arno.

— E.M. Forster

He had no glimpse of the comradeship after which the girl’s soul yearned.

— E.M. Forster

To ascend, to stretch a hand up the mountainside until a hand catches it, was the end for which he had been born.

— E M Forster

He wanted to live now, to win at tennis, to stand for all he was worth in the sun – in the sun which had begun to decline and was shining in her eyes; and he did win.

— E.M. Forster

She might be forgetting her Italy, but she was noticing more things in her England.

— E.M. Forster

He simply enfolded her in his manly arms.

— E.M. Forster
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