01UndatedNo; look out for the part where you think you have done with the goblins and they come back,' breathed Helen, as the music started with a goblin walking quietly over the universe, from end to end.E.M. Forster / quote ↗
02UndatedWhile her lips talked culture, her heart was planning to invite him to teaE.M. Forster / quote ↗
05UndatedAll a child's life depends on the ideal it has of its parents. Destroy that and everything goes - morals, behavior, everything. Absolute trust in someone else is the essence of education.E.M. Forster / quote ↗
06UndatedI'd far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children.E.M. Forster / quote ↗
07UndatedFor a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and—by some sad, strange irony—it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy.E.M. Forster / quote ↗
08UndatedI was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows.E.M. Forster / quote ↗
09UndatedWhen we were only acquaintances, you let me be myself, but now you're always protecting me... I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. Can't I be trusted to face the truth but I must get it second-hand through you? A woman's place!E.M. Forster / quote ↗
10UndatedPeople turned out to be alive. Hitherto he had supposed that they were what he pretended to be - flat pieces of cardboard stamped with a conventional design… there came by no process of reason a conviction that they were human beings with feelings akin to his own.E.M. Forster / quote ↗
11UndatedWe must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.E.M. Forster / quote ↗
12UndatedAs for her hair, or rather hairs, they are too complicated to describe, but one system went down her back, lying in a thick pad there, while another, created for a lighter destiny, rippled around her forehead.E.M. Forster / quote ↗
13UndatedThe novelist defines the story with the following example: If you are told that the king died and then the queen died, that is a sequence of events. If you were told that the king died and then the queen died of grief, that is a story that he was interested.E.M. Forster / quote ↗
14UndatedYou 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. Forster / quote ↗
15UndatedFew travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul.E.M. Forster / quote ↗
16UndatedNight and day, wind and storm, tide and earthquake, impeded man no longer. He had harnessed Leviathan. All the old literature, with its praise of Nature, and its fear of Nature, rang false as the prattle of a child.E.M. Forster / quote ↗
17UndatedHow can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in exile. The important towns they build are only retreats, their quarrels the malaise of men who cannot find their way home. India knows of their trouble. She knows of the whole world's trouble, to its uttermost depth. She calls "Come" through her hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august. But come to what? She has never defined. She is not a promise, only an appeal.E.M. Forster / quote ↗
19UndatedHardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.E.M. Forster / quote ↗
20UndatedThere is only a certain amount of kindness in the world…just as there is a certain amount of light. We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things…Choose a place where you won’t do very much harm and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.E.M. Forster / quote ↗
21UndatedIt is the starved imagination, not the well-nourished, that is afraid.E.M. Forster / quote ↗
22UndatedHe will work off his crudities in time. I rather mistrust young men who slip into life gracefully.E.M. Forster / quote ↗
24UndatedThe issues Miss Quested had raised were so much more important than she was herself that people inevitably forgot her.E.M. Forster / quote ↗