E. M. Forster

“It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are rig...”

“Chicago - a facade of skyscrapers facing a lake and behind the facade every type of dubiousness.”

“How can I know what I think till I see what I say?”

“We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes,...”

“The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.”

“Life' wrote a friend of mine, 'is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.”

“Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate. Adventures do occur, but not punctually.”

“Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.”

“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”

“Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural an...”

“Miss Abbott, don't worry over me. Some people are born not to do things. I'm one of them.”

“We reach in desperation beyond the fog, beyond the very stars, the voids of the universe are ransacked to justify the monster, and stamped with a human face. London is religions opportunity-...”

“Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him.”

“She gave up trying to understand herself, and the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words. The armies are full of...”

“It is so difficult - at least, I find it difficult - to understand people who speak the truth.”

“The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the ess...”

“George had turned at the sound of her arrival. For a moment he contemplated her, as one who had fallen out of heaven. He saw radiant joy in her face, he saw the flowers beat against her dres...”

“Eccolo!” he exclaimed. At the same moment the ground gave way, and with a cry she fell out of the wood. Light and beauty enveloped her. She had fallen on to a little open terrace, which was...”

“Mr. Herriton, don’t – please, Mr. Herriton – a dentist. His father’s a dentist.” Philip gave a cry of personal disgust and pain. He shuddered all over, and edged away from his companion. A d...”

“We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.”