1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. E.M. Forster

E.M. Forster Quotes
page 4

Edward Morgan Forster , known as E. M. Forster, was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. Many of his novels examined class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society, notably A Room with a View , Howards End , and A Passage to India , which brought him his greatest success. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 16 different years.

✵ 1. January 1879 – 7. June 1970   •   Other names Е. М. Форстер
E.M. Forster photo
E.M. Forster: 200   quotes 40   likes

E.M. Forster Quotes

“This conversation taught me that some of us can meet reality on this side of the grave. I do not envy them. Such adventures may profit the disembodied soul, but as long as I have flesh and blood I pray that my grossness preserve me. Our lower nature has its dreams. Mine is of a certain farm, windy but fruitful, half-way between the deserted moorland and the uninhabitable sea. Hither, at rare intervals, she should descend and he ascend, to shatter their spiritual communion by one caress.”

E.M. Forster

The Rock
The Life to Come and other stories (1972)

Dreams , Way , Soul , Nature

“In these English farms, if anywhere, one might see life steadily and see it whole, group in one vision its transitoriness and its eternal youth, connect — connect without bitterness until all men are brothers.”

E.M. Forster book Howards End

Source: Howards End (1910), Ch. 33

Life , Men , Youth

“Naked I came into this world, naked I shall go out of it. And a very good thing too, for it reminds me that I am naked under my shirt, whatever its colour.”

E.M. Forster

What I Believe (1938)

World

“His hand came nearer, his eyes danced round the room, which began to fill with a golden haze. He beckoned, and Clesant moved into his arms. Clesand had often been proud of his disease but never, never of his body, it had never occurred to him that he could provoke desire. This sudden revelation shattered him, he fell from his pedestal, but not alone, there was someone to cling to, broad shoulders, a sunburnt throat, lips that parted as they touched him to murmur – ‘And to hell with Woolacott’.”

E.M. Forster

Dr Woolacott
The Life to Come and other stories (1972)

Disease , Hell , Dance , Parting

“The newspapers still talk about glory but the average man, thank God, has got rid of that illusion. It is a damned bore, with a stall mate as the most probable outcome, but one has to see it through, and see it through with the knowledge that whichever side wins, civilisation in Europe will be pipped for the next 30 years. Don't indulge in Romance here, Malcolm, or suppose that an era of jolly little nationalities is dawning. We shall be much too much occupied with pestilence and poverty to reconstruct.”

E.M. Forster

Letter 136, to Malcolm Darling, 6 November 1914
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

God , Knowledge

“An efficiency-regime cannot be run without a few heroes stuck about it to carry off the dullness — much as plums have to be put into bad pudding to make it palatable.”

E.M. Forster

What I Believe (1938)

“Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.”

E.M. Forster

"Cambridge"
Two Cheers for Democracy (1951)

“Probable that I am now better than most people and as good as I ever shall be at this game, and can therefore get to know anyone I wish, provided I am not physically repellent. And perhaps this is why personal relationships no longer seem to me a serious branch of study.”

E.M. Forster

Source: Commonplace Book (1985), p. 45

People , Game , Study , Personality

“[Before the prostate operation] I feel gay and calm, but have an open mind as to whether I shall get through or not[. ] I don't say this to anyone else, but I love you too much to say anything but the truth. I don't feel afraid of anything and it is your love that has made me be like this. I hope to come back to you and everything and be as before, and I will try my best to do so.”

E.M. Forster

Letter 311, to Robert J. Buckingham, 17 December 1935
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

Love , Truth , Hope , Feeling

“Pathos, piety, courage, — they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.”

E.M. Forster book A Passage to India

Source: A Passage to India (1924), Ch. 14

Courage

“Dead silence ensued, which was well enough for Ansell, to whom it merely meant that neither of us had any more to say. But to educated people silence matters; it is a token of stupidity and lack of invention.”

E.M. Forster

Ansell
The Life to Come and other stories (1972)

People , Stupidity , Education , Silence

“As for 'story' I never yet did enjoy a novel or play in which someone didn't tell me afterward that there was something wrong with the story, so that's going to be no drawback as far as I'm concerned. "Good Lord, why am I so bored"—"I know; it must be the plot developing harmoniously." So I often reply to myself, and there rises before me my special nightmare—that of the writer as craftsman, natty and deft.”

E.M. Forster

Letter 104, to Forrest Reid, 19 June 1912
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

“One can run away from women, turn them out, or give in to them. No fourth course.”

E.M. Forster

Source: Commonplace Book (1985), p. 92

Women

“Your letter firmed me up a lot. It certainly is a comfort to know that my work is respected by someone whom I respect and am as fond as you. It confirms my beliefe that life is notall nonsense and cruelty—the inversion of Victorian complacency—but has hard spots of sense and love bobbing about in it here and there.”

E.M. Forster

Letter 330, to Christopher Isherwood, 28 August 1938
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

Love , Life , Sense

“I had an interesting day's reading yesterday, with the sudden sensation of being in close contact with what I was reading. […] But as for reading how curious it is: all these books, their lore of the ages, waiting to be embraced but usually slipping out of one's nerveless hands on to the floor. When one reads properly it is as if a third person is present.”

E.M. Forster

Letter 419, to William Plomer, 12 December 1957
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

Books , Age , Waiting , Reading

“Pain is good, I'd say, when it's incidental to Love. In 'I give up my life for my friend' it is my friend, not my death, that matters. And sometimes I needn't give up my life for him, I can live for him, and with him, and the power of the spirit is then equally manifested, I should think.”

E.M. Forster

Letter 285, to George Thomson, 1 August 1931
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

Love , Life , Death , Pain

“Before the civil war, Pottibakia was a normal member of the Comity of Nations. She erected tariff walls, broke treaties, persecuted minorities, obstructed at conferences unless she was convinced there was no danger of a satisfactory solution; then she strained every nerve in the cause of peace.”

E.M. Forster

What Does It Matter? A Morality
The Life to Come and other stories (1972)

War , Peace

“We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.”

E.M. Forster

"The Tercentenary of the 'Areopagitica'"
Two Cheers for Democracy (1951)

Freedom , Past

“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.”

E.M. Forster book Howards End

Source: Howards End (1910), Ch. 22

Passion , Love , Life , Making love

“Always fatuity, vulgarity, as soon as human passion is touched. […] Just as some poetry is of the eye (form, colour) and some of the ear, so Keats is of the palate. Not only has he constant reference to its pleasures, but the general sensation after reading him is one of tasting. 'What's the harm?”

E.M. Forster

Well, taste for some reason or the other can't carry one far into the world of beauty—that reason being perhaps that though you don't want comradership there you do want the possibility of comradership, and A cannot swallow B's mouthful by any possibility:....and this exclusiveness (to maunder on) also attaches to the physical side of sex though not the least to the spiritual.
Letter 162, to Malcolm Darling, 1 December 1916
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

Pleasure , Reading , Passion

“This title comes from a phrase from his 1938 essay "What I Believe" which is the first essay in the book.”

E.M. Forster

Two Cheers for Democracy (1951)

Books

“Music is the deepest of the arts and deep beneath the arts.”

E.M. Forster

Harvard University Department of Music, Music and Criticism, A Symposium (May 1947; published 1948, p. 11 https://archive.org/details/musiccriticismsy00symp/page/10)

Music , Art

“Going to Bits. This phrase me to day and is indeed the one I have been looking for; not tragic, not mortal disintegration; only a central weakness which prevents me from concentrating or settling down I have so wanted to write and write ahead. The phrase "obligatory creation" has haunted me. I have so wanted to get out of my morning bath promptly: have decided to do so beforehand, and have then lain in it as usual and watched myself not getting out. It looks as if there is a physical as well as a moral break in the orders I send out. I have plenty of interesting thoughts but keep losing them like the post cards I have written, or like my cap. I can't clear anything up yet interrupt a 'good read' in order to clear up. I hope tomorrow to copy out a piece of someone else's prose: it is the best device known to me for taking one out of inself, Plunge into anothers minutiae.'”

E.M. Forster

31-1-61

p. 224
Commonplace Book (1985)

Hope , Reading

“You can gather however that I know I am not a real artist, and at the same time am fearfully serious over my work and willing to sweat at atmosphere if it helps me do what I want. What I want, I think, is the sentimental, but the sentimental reached by no easy beaten track—I cannot explain myself properly, for you must remember (I forget it myself) that though 'clever' I have a small and cloudy brain, and cannot clear it by talking or reading philosophy.”

E.M. Forster

Letter 60, to Robert Trevelyan, 28 October 1905
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

Time , Reading , Forgetting , Help

“The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The common place person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but transalate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions.”

E.M. Forster book A Room with a View

Source: A Room with a View (1908), Ch. 3

Personality , Music , Thinking , World

“As for 'story' I never yet did enjoy a novel or play in which someone didn't tell me afterward that there was something wrong with the story, so that's going to be no drawback as far as I'm concerned. "Good Lord, why am I so bored"—"I know; it must be the plot developing harmoniously."”

E.M. Forster

So I often reply to myself, and there rises before me my special nightmare—that of the writer as craftsman, natty and deft.
Letter 104, to Forrest Reid, 19 June 1912
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

“What puzzles me most is your criticism that he showed 'no sense of engagement.”

E.M. Forster

I haven't met the expression before, and feel bound to comment on its totalitarian tang. Engagement not with the truth as the speaker apprehends it, but with the alleged opinion of the majority of listeners.
Letter 400, to John Morris, 12 January 1953
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

Sense

“Why can't we be friends now?' said the other, holding him affectionately. 'It's what I want. It's what you want.”

E.M. Forster book A Passage to India

But the horses didn't want it — they swerved apart: the earth didn't want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temple, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they emerged from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn't want it, they said in their hundred voices 'No, not yet,' and the sky said 'No, not there.'
Source: A Passage to India (1924), Ch. 37

“There are moments when I feel Howards End peculiarly our own." "All the same, London's creeping.”

E.M. Forster book Howards End

She pointed over the meadow--over eight or nine meadows, but at the end of them was a red rust. "You see that in Surrey and even Hampshire now," she continued. "I can see it from the Purbeck Downs. And London is only part of something else, I'm afraid. Life's going to be melted down, all over the world." Margaret knew that her sister spoke truly. Howards End, Oniton, the Purbeck Downs, the Oderberge, were all survivals, and the melting-pot was being prepared for them. Logically, they had no right to be alive. One's hope was in the weakness of logic. Were they possibly the earth beating time?
Source: Howards End (1910), Ch. 44

Feeling