Edward Morgan Forster citations

Page 3

“It is fate that I am here,' George persisted, 'but you can call it Italy if it makes you less unhappy.”

“She stopped and leant her elbows against the parapet of the embankment. He did likewise. There is at times a magic in identity of position; it is one of the things that have suggested to us eternal comradeship.”

“I taught him, 'he quavered, "to trust in love. I said:'when love comes, that is reality.' I said: 'Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand.”

“Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand.”

“I cannot help thinking that there is something to admire in everyone, even if you do not approve of them.”

“I am an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort.”

“Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.”

“The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.”

“… there are shadows because there are hills.”

“She could not explain in so many words, but she felt that those who prepare for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.”

“If we act the truth the people who really love us are sure to come back to us in the long run”

“Did you ever dream you had a friend, Alec? Someone to last your whole life and you his. I suppose such a thing can’t really happen outside sleep.”

“A humanist has four leading characteristics — curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.”

“There's enough sorrow in the world, isn't there, without trying to invent it.”

“While her lips talked culture, her heart was planning to invite him to tea”

“Passion should believe itself irresistible. It should forget civility and consideration and all the other curses of a refined nature. Above all, it should never ask for leave where there is a right of way.”

“Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time). It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West.”

“After all, is not a real Hell better than a manufactured Heaven?”

“It's not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts.”

“I do like Christmas on the whole…. In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But it is clumsier every year.”

“She only felt that the candle would burn better, the packing go easier, the world be happier, if she could give and receive some human love.”

“Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?”

“All 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.”

“She loved him absolutely, perhaps for half an hour.”

“At times our need for a sympathetic gesture is so great that we care not what exactly it signifies or how much we may have to pay for it afterwards.”

“It comes to this then: there always have been people like me and always will be, and generally they have been persecuted.”

“… though nothing is damaged, everything is changed.”

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

“One doesn't come to Italy for niceness," was the retort; "one comes for life. Buon giorno! Buon giorno!”