E.M. Forster

“He never retorted that the artist is not a bricklayer at all, but a horseman whose business it is to catch Pegasus at once, not to practise for him by mounting tamer colts. This is hard, hot and generally ungraceful work, but it is not drudgery. For drudgery is not art, and cannot lead to it.”

“But a lover is dogmatic. To him the world shall be beautiful and pure. When it is not, he ignores it.”

“He chanced to be in a lucid critical mood, and would not sympathize with exaltation.”

“I will take you by a dear dirty back way, Miss Honeychurch, and if you bring me luck, we shall have an adventure.”

“But in public who shall express the unseen adequately? It is private life that holds out the mirror to infinity; personal intercourse, and that alone, that ever hints at a personality beyond our daily vision.”

“He has the merit—if it is one—of saying exactly what he means.”

“It's better to be fooled than to be suspicious - that the confidence trick is the work of man, but the want-of-confidence trick is the work of the devil.”

“England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.”

“Give me life, with its struggles and victories, with its failures and hatreds, with its deep moral meaning and its unknown goal!”

“Man's feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong. Then I went further: it was then that I called to you for the first time, and you would not come.”

“But it was the stupidity of passion, which would rather have nothing than a little.”

“Words deserted him immediately. He could only speak when he was not asked to.”

“Maurice was scandalized, horrified. He was shocked to the bottom of his suburban soul....”

“He never even thought of tenderness and emotion; his considerations about Durham remained cold. Durham didn't dislike him, he was sure. That was all he wanted. One thing at a time. He didn't so much as have hopes, for hope distracts, and he had a great deal to see to.”

“True socialism is based not on equality of income or character, but on the equality of manners.”

“Ronny’s religion was of the sterilized Public School brand, which never goes bad, even in the tropics. Wherever he entered, mosque, cave or temple, he retained the spiritual outlook of the fifth form, and condemned as ‘weakening’ any attempt to understand them.”

“You are inclined to get muddled, if I may judge from last night. Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.”

“He has dreams—not exactly spiritual dreams: but dreams of the tangible and the actual: robust dreams, which take him, not to heaven, but another earth.”

“For life is practically a battle. To all intents and purposes a battle. Except for a few lucky fellows who can read books, and so avoid the realities.”

“I have no profession. It is another example of my decadence. My attitude - quite an indefensible one - is that so long as I am no trouble to any one I have a right to do as I like. I know I ought to be getting money out of people, or devoting myself to things I don’t care a straw about, but somehow, I’ve not been able to begin.”“You are quite fortunate, it is quite a wonderful opportunity, the possession of leisure.”

“...The conversation had become unreal since Christianity had entered it. Ronny approved of religion as long as it endorsed the National Anthem, but he objected when it attempted to influence his life.”

“There is no harm in deceiving society as long as she does not find you out, because it is only when she finds you out that you have harmed her; she is not like a friend or God, who are injured by the mere existence of unfaithfulness.”

“He had brought out the man in Alec, and now it was Alec’s turn to bring out the hero in him”

“You mean that a Frenchman could share with a friend and yet not go to prison?’ ‘Share? Do you mean unite? If both are of age and avoid public indecency, certainly.’ ‘Will the law ever be that in England?’ ‘I doubt it. England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.”

“I think you’re beautiful, the only beautiful person I’ve ever seen. I love your voice and everything to do with you, down to your clothes or the room you are sitting in. I adore you.”

“I feel to you as Pippa to her fiancé, only far more nobly, far more deeply, body and soul, no starved medievalism of course, only a – a particular harmony of body and soul that I don’t think women have even guessed. But you know.”

“He would not deceive himself so much. He would not – and this was the test – pretend to care about women when the only sex that attracted him was his own. He loved men and always had loved them. He longed to embrace them and mingle his being with theirs. Now that the man who returned his love had been lost, he admitted this.”

“He took no interest in politics, which ruin the character and career, yet nothing can be achieved without them.”

“They too entered the world of dreams- that world in which a third of each man's life is spent, and which is thought by some pessimists to be a premonition of eternity.”

“Happy Charlotte, who, though greatly troubled over things that did not matter, seemed oblivious to things that did...”

“You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.”

“Yet complicated people were getting wet - not only the shepherds. For instance, the piano-tuner was sopping. So was the vicar's wife. So were the lieutenant and the peevish damsels in his Battlesden car. Gallantry, charity, and art pursued their various missions, perspiring and muddy, while out on the slopes beyond them stood the eternal man and the eternal dog, guarding eternal sheep until the world is vegetarian.”

“Life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish tother from which.”

“I was yours once 'till death if you'd cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now - I can't hang about whining forever - and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked, and attend to your own happiness?”

“I suppose I shall have to live now”

“Athletes, he believed, were simple, straightforward people, cruel and brutal if you like, but never petty. They knocked you down and hurt you, and then went on their way rejoicing.”

“Science explained people, but could not understand them.”

“There's never any great risk as long as you have money.”

“And the triviality faded from their faces, though it left something behind -- the knowledge that they could never be parted because their love was rooted in common things.”

“It all turns on affection now," said Margaret. "Affection. Don't you see?... And affection, when reciprocated, gives rights. Put that down in your notebook, Mr. Mansbridge. It's a useful formula.”

“For that little incident had impressed the three women more than might be supposed. It remained as a goblin footfall, as a hint that all is not for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and that beneath these superstructures of wealth and art there wanders an ill-fed boy, who has recovered his umbrella indeed, but who has left no address behind him, and no name.”

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

“Conse­quently the Wolfenden recommendations will be indefinitely rejected, police prosecutions will continue and Clive on the bench will continue to sentence Alec in the dock. Maurice may get off.”

“Discussion keeps a house alive. It cannot stand by bricks and mortar alone.”

“He had no racial feeling—not because he was superior to his brother civilians, but because he had matured in a different atmosphere, where the herd instinct does not flourish.”

“God has put us on earth to love our neighbors and to show it, and He is omnipresent, even in India, to see how we are succeeding.”

“One touch of regret- not the canny substitute but the true regret from the heart- would have made him a different man, and the British Empire a different institution.”

“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.”

“How fortunate that it was an 'unconventional' party, where formalities are ruled out! On this basis Aziz found the English ladies easy to talk to, he treated them like men. Beauty would have troubled him, but Mrs Moore was so old and Miss Quested so plain that he was spared this anxiety.”

“Love felt and returned, love which our bodies exact and our hearts have transfigured, love which is the most real thing that we shall ever meet, reappeared now as the world's enemy, and she must stifle it.”