E. M. Forster

“The Waves is an extraordinary achievement ... It is trembling on the edge. A little less - and it would lose its poetry. A little more - and it would be over into the abyss, and be dull and...”

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

“Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.”

“If we lived for ever, what you say would be true. But we have to die, we have to leave life presently. Injustice and greed would be the real thing if we lived for ever. As it is, we must hol...”

“Some leave our life with tears, others with an insane frigidity; Mrs. Wilcox had taken the middle course, which only rarer natures can pursue. She had kept proportion. She had told a little...”

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

“He had awoken too late for happiness, but not for strength, and could feel an austere joy, as of a warrior who is homeless but stands fully armed.”

“There was something better in life than this rub­bish, if only he could get to it—love—nobility—big spaces where passion clasped peace, spaces no science could reach, but they existed for ev...”

“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”

“Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off, but opening out.”

“A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.”

“Yet he was doing a fine thing — proving on how little a soul can exist. Fed neither by Heaven nor by Earth he was going forward, a lamp that would have blown out, were materialism true. He h...”

“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...”

“I can only do what's easy. I can only entice and be enticed. I can't, and won't, attempt difficult relations. If I marry it will either be a man who's strong enough to boss me or whom I'm st...”

“For human intercourse, as soon as we look at it for its own sake and not as a social adjunct, is seen to be haunted by a spectre. We cannot understand each other, except in a rough and ready...”

“But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear and merge into something else.”

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

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

“I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.”

“What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.”