The voices / 200 fragments

E.M. Forster

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

Author and source reference ↗

▷ Play this voice Search within this voice ↗Place in time ↗love knowledge mind life death friendship learning truth

Archive entries

01Undated

Mr. Herriton, don’t – please, Mr. Herriton – a dentist. His father’s a dentist.” Philip gave a cry of personal disgust and pain. He shuddered all over, and edged away from his companion. A dentist! A dentist at Monteriano. A dentist in fairyland! False teeth and laughing gas and the tilting chair at a place which knew the Etruscan League, and the Pax Romana, and Alaric himself, and the Countess Matilda, and the Middle Ages, all fighting and holiness, and the Renaissance, all fighting and beauty! He thought of Lilia no longer. He was anxious for himself: he feared that Romance might die.

E.M. Forster / quote

02Undated

There was something better in life than this rubbish, if only he could get to it—love—nobility—big spaces where passion clasped peace, spaces no science could reach, but they existed for ever, full of woods some of them, and arched with majestic sky and a friend. . .

E.M. Forster / quote

03Undated

I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's.

E.M. Forster / quote

04Undated

Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.

E.M. Forster / quote

05Undated

If we lived for ever, what you say would be true. But we have to die, we have to leave life presently. Injustice and greed would be the real thing if we lived for ever. As it is, we must hold to other things, because Death is coming. I love death - not morbidly, but because He explains. He shows me the emptiness of Money. Death and Money are the eternal foes. Not Death and Life. . . . Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him. Behind the coffins and the skeletons that stay the vulgar mind lies something so immense that all that is great in us responds to it. Men of the world may recoil from the charnel-house that they will one day enter, but Love knows better. Death is his foe, but his peer, and in their age-long struggle the thews of Love have been strengthened, and his vision cleared, until there is no one who can stand against him.

E.M. Forster / quote

06Undated

Some leave our life with tears, others with an insane frigidity; Mrs. Wilcox had taken the middle course, which only rarer natures can pursue. She had kept proportion. She had told a little of her grim secret to her friends, but not too much; she had shut up her heart--almost, but not entirely. It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die--neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave.

E.M. Forster / quote

07Undated

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

E.M. Forster / quote

08Undated

The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them.

E.M. Forster / quote

09Undated

The Waves is an extraordinary achievement ... It is trembling on the edge. A little less - and it would lose its poetry. A little more - and it would be over into the abyss, and be dull and arty. It is her greatest book.

E.M. Forster / quote

10Undated

How do I know what I think until I see what I say?

E.M. Forster / quote

11Undated

Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off, but opening out.

E.M. Forster / quote

12Undated

A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.

E.M. Forster / quote

13Undated

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

E.M. Forster / quote

14Undated

But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear and merge into something else.

E.M. Forster / quote

15Undated

Books have to be read (worse luck, for it takes a long time); it is the only way of discovering what they contain.

E.M. Forster / quote

16Undated

School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible.

E.M. Forster / quote

17Undated

Mr Abrahams was a preparatory schoolmaster of the old-fashioned sort. He cared neither for work nor games, but fed his boys well and saw that they did not misbehave. The rest he left to the parents, and did not speculate how much the parents were leaving to him. Amid mutual compliments the boys passed out into a public school, healthy but backward, to receive upon undefended flesh the first blows of the world.

E.M. Forster / quote

18Undated

He had known so much about her once -what she thought, how she felt, the reasons for her actions. And now he only knew that he loved her, and all the other knowledge seemed passing from him just as he needed it most.

E.M. Forster / quote

19Undated

He educated Maurice, or rather his spirit educated Maurice's spirit, for they themselves became equal. Neither thought "Am I led; am I leading?" Love had caught him out of triviality and Maurice out of bewilderment in order that two imperfect souls might touch perfection.

E.M. Forster / quote

20Undated

I can only do what's easy. I can only entice and be enticed. I can't, and won't, attempt difficult relations. If I marry it will either be a man who's strong enough to boss me or whom I'm strong enough to boss. So I shan't ever marry, for there aren't such men. And Heaven help any one whom I do marry, for I shall certainly run away from him before you can say 'Jack Robinson.

E.M. Forster / quote

21Undated

And if insight were sufficient, if the inner life were the whole of life, their happiness has been assured.

E.M. Forster / quote

22Undated

we may say that History develops, Art stands still

E.M. Forster / quote

23Undated

Science explained people, but could not understand them.

E.M. Forster / quote

24Undated

Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.

E.M. Forster / quote