E.M. Forster

“I'm a holy man minus the holiness. Hand that on to your three spies, and tell them to put it in their pipes.”

“Because a thing is going strong now, it need not go strong for ever,' she said. 'This craze for motion has only set in during the last hundred years. It may be followed by a civilization that won't be a movement, because it will rest on the earth. All the signs are against it now, but I can't help hoping.”

“Not even to herself dare she blame Helen. She could not assess her trespass by any moral code; it was everything or nothing. Morality can tell us that murder is worse than stealing, and group most sins in an order all must approve, but it cannot group Helen. The surer its pronouncements on this point, the surer may we be that morality is not speaking. Christ was evasive when they questioned Him. It is those that cannot connect who hasten to cast the first stone.”

“Oh, hang it all! what's the good—I mean, the good of living in a room for ever? There one goes on day after day, same old game, same up and down to town, until you forget there is any other game. You ought to see once in a way what's going on outside, if it's only nothing particular after all.”

“...innocence is not safe in a civilization like ours, where a man must practice a 'ruled undemonstrative distrustfulness' in order to defend himself against traps. This 'ruled undemonstrative distrustfulness' is not confined to business men, but exists everywhere. We all exercise it. I know I do, and I should be surprised if you, who are listening to me, didn't. All we can do (and Melville gives us this hint) is to exercise it consciously, as Captain Vere did. It is unconscious distrustfulness that corrodes the heart and destroys the heart's insight, and prevents it from saluting goodness.”

“The advance of regret can be so gradual that it is impossible to say "yesterday I was happy, today I am not.”

“The historian records, but the novelist creates.”

“They had never struggled, and only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.”

“It is obvious enough for the reader to conclude, "She loves young Emerson." A reader in Lucy's place would not find it obvious. Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice, and we welcome "nerves" or any other shibboleth that will cloak our personal desire. She loved Cecil; George made her nervous; will the reader explain to her that the phrases should have been reversed?”

“They go forth into it with well deveoped bodies,fairly developed minds and undeveloped hearts... An undeveloped heart, not a cold one. The difference is important...”

“The issues Miss Quested had raised were so much more important than she was herself that people inevitably forgot her.”

“No one, except Ronny, had any idea of what passed in her mind, and he only dimly, for where there is officialism every human relationship suffers.”

“When that strange race nears the dust and is condemned as untouchable, then nature remembers the physical perfection that she accomplished elsewhere, and throws out a god--not many, but one here and there, to prove to society how little its categories impress her.”

“Do you suppose there's any difference between spring in nature and spring in man? But there we go, praising the one and condemning the other as improper, ashamed that the same laws work eternally through both.”

“He did not know, but presently he would know. Great is information, and she shall prevail.”

“One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.”

“You can when you mean to,' said Maurice gently. 'You can do anything once you know what it is.”

“Do you remember Italy?”

“The final test of a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.”

“I only wish the poets would say this too: love is of the body; not the body, but of the the body. Ah! the misery that would be saved if we confessed that! Ah! for a little directness to liberate the soul!”

“Man has to pick up the use of his functions as he goes along- especially the function of Love.”

“Sensuality, as long as it is straightforward did not repel him, but this derived sensuality - the sort that classes a mistress among motor-cars if she is beautiful, and among eye-flies if she isn't - was alien to his own emotions . . . It was, in a new form, the old, old trouble that eats the heart out of every civilization: snobbery, the desire for possessions, creditable appendages; and it is to escape this rather than the lusts of the flesh that the saints retreat into the Himalayas.”

“It will be generally admitted that Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.”

“Aziz winked at him slowly and said: “...There are many ways of being a man; mine is to express what is deepest in my heart.”

“She loved him with too clear a vision to fear his cloudiness”

“A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense, Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.”

“It's miles worse for you than that; I'm in love with your gamekeeper.”

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

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

“Why children?' he asked. 'Why always children? For love to end where it begins is far more beautiful, and Nature knows it.”

“Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man.”

“All invitations must proceed from heaven perhaps; perhaps it is futile for men to initiate their own unity, they do but widen the gulfs between them by the attempt. So at all events thought old Mr. Graysford and young Mr. Sorley, the devoted missionaries who lived out beyond the slaughterhouses, always travelled third on the railways, and never came to the club. In our Father's house are many mansions, they taught, and there alone will the incompatible multitudes of mankind be welcomed and soothed. Not one shall be turned away by the servants on that verandah, be he black or white, not one shall be kept standing who approaches with a loving heart. And why should the divine hospitality cease here? Consider, with all reverence, the monkeys. May there not be a mansion for the monkeys also? Old Mr. Graysford said No, but young Mr. Sorley, who was advanced, said Yes; he saw no reason why monkeys should not have their collateral share of bliss, and he had sympathetic discussions about them with his Hindu friends. And the jackals? Jackals were indeed less to Mr. Sorley's mind but he admitted that the mercy of God, being infinite, may well embrace all mammals. And the wasps? He became uneasy during the descent to wasps, and was apt to change the conversation. And oranges, cactuses, crystals and mud? and the bacteria inside Mr. Sorley? No, no, this is going too far. We must exclude someone from our gathering, or we shall be left with nothing.”

“I'm afraid that in nine cases out of ten Nature pulls one way and human nature another.”

“Human beings have their great chance in the novel.”

“En ese preciso momento el camino se abría y con una exclamación Lucy se encontró fuera del bosque. Luz y belleza la envolvía. Había ido a dar a una pequeña terraza que estaba cubierta de violetas de un extremo a otro.- ¡Valor! -exclamó su compañero, erguido a unos seis pies de altura respecto a ella-. Valor y amor.Ella no respondió. A sus pies el suelo se cortaba bruscamente dando paso a la panorámica. Violetas que se agrupaban alrededor de arroyos y corrientes y cascadas, regando la vertiente de la colina de azul, arremolinándose alrededor de los troncos de los árboles, formando lagunas en los agujeros, cubriendo la hierba con manchas de espuma azulada. Jamás volvería a haberlas en tal profusión. La terraza era el principio de lo bello, la fuente original donde la belleza hacía brotar agua que iba a la tierra.De pie en el margen, como un nadador que se prepara, estaba el buen hombre. Pero no era el buen hombre que ella había pensado, y estaba solo.George se había vuelto al oír su llegada. Por un momento la contempló, como si fuera alguien que bajaba de los cielos. Vio la radiante alegría en su cara, las flores que batían su vestido en olas azuladas. Los arbustos que la encerraban por encima. Subió rápidamente hasta donde estaba ella y la besó.Antes de que ella pudiera decir algo, casi antes de que pudiera sentir nada, una voz llamó: ¡Lucy!, ¡Lucy!, ¡Lucy!. La señorita Bartlett, que era una mancha oscura en la panorámica, había roto el silencio de la vida.”

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

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

“Don't go fighting against the Spring.”

“Sometimes I think too much fuss is made about marriage. Century after century of carnal embracement and we're still no nearer to understanding one another.”

“I'd far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children.”

“Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate.”

“It never bored them to hear words, words; they breathed them with the cool night air.”

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

“Maurice hated cricket. It demanded a snickety neatness he could not supply.”

“To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it.”

“We are reverting to the civilization of luggage, and historians of the future will note how the middle classes accreted possessions without taking root in the earth, and may find in this the secret of their imaginative poverty.”

“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.”

“When love flies it is remembered not as love but as something else.”

“At times he entertained the dream. Two men can defy the world.”

“But this time I'm not to blame; I want you to believe that. I simply slipped into those violets. No, I want to be really truthful. I am a little to blame. The sky, you know, was gold, and the ground all blue, and for a moment he looked like some one in a book.”