Quotessence
Home / Authors / E.M. Forster

E.M. Forster Quotes

Author

Filter quotes by topic

Famous E.M. Forster Quotes

“So never give in,” continued the girl, and restated again and again the vague yet convincing plea that the Invisible lodges against the Visible. Her excitement grew as she tried to cut the rope that fastened Leonard to the earth. Woven of bitter experience, it resisted her. Presently the waitress entered and gave her a letter from Margaret. Another note, addressed to Leonard, was inside. They read them, listening to the murmurings of the river.”

“With the first jolt he was in daylight; they had left the gateways of King’s Cross, and were under blue sky. Tunnels followed, and after each the sky grew bluer, and from the embankment at Finsbury Park he had his first sight of the sun. It rolled along behind the eastern smokes — a wheel, whose fellow was the descending moon — and as yet it seemed the servant of the blue sky, not its lord. He dozed again. Over Tewin Water it was day. To the left fell the shadow of the embankment and its arches; to the right Leonard saw up into the Tewin Woods and towards the church, with its wild legend of immortality. Six forest trees — that is a fact — grow out of one of the graves in Tewin churchyard. The grave’s occupant — that is the legend — is an atheist, who declared that if God existed, six forest trees would grow out of her grave. These things in Hertfordshire; and farther afield lay the house of a hermit — Mrs. Wilcox had known him — who barred himself up, and wrote prophecies, and gave all he had to the poor. While, powdered in between, were the villas of business men, who saw life more steadily, though with the steadiness of the half-closed eye. Over all the sun was streaming, to all the birds were singing, to all the primroses were yellow, and the speedwell blue, and the country, however they interpreted her, was uttering her cry of “now. ” She did not free Leonard yet, and the knife plunged deeper into his heart as the train drew up at Hilton. But remorse had become beautiful.”

“I am used to young people,” said Mrs. Wilcox, and with each word she spoke the outlines of known things grew dim. “I hear a great deal of chatter at home, for we, like you, entertain a great deal. With us it is more sport and politics, but — I enjoyed my lunch very much, Miss Schlegel, dear, and am not pretending, and only wish I could have joined in more. For one thing, I’m not particularly well just to-day. For another, you younger people move so quickly that it dazes me. Charles is the same, Dolly the same. But we are all in the same boat, old and young. I never forget that.”

“How wide the gulf between Henry as he was and Henry as Helen thought he ought to be! And she herself—hovering as usual between the two, now accepting men as they are, now yearning with her sister for Truth. Love and Truth—their warfare seems eternal. Perhaps the whole visible world rests on it, and if they were one, life itself, like the spirits when Prospero was reconciled to his brother, might vanish into air, into thin air.”

“—Tú te interesas por mí un poquito, lo creo —admitió—. Pero no puedo basar toda mi vida en un poquito. Ni tú. Tú apoyas la tuya en Anne. No te preocupas de sí tu relación con ella es platónica o no. Solo sabes que es lo suficientemente grande como para apoyar en ella una vida. Yo no puedo apoyar la mía en los cinco minutos que me dedicas entre ella y la política. Tú no harás nada por mí, salvo verme. Es lo único que has hecho en todo este año infernal. Me dejas libremente en tu casa, y procuras por todos los medios casarme, porque eso te libera de mí. Te preocupas un poco por mí, ya lo sé —pues Clive había protestado—, pero nada tenemos que hablar, y tú no me amas. Yo fui tuyo una vez hasta la muerte, y lo sería si te hubieras preocupado de conservarme, pero ahora soy de otro… No puedo apoyarme en el dolor para siempre… y él es mío de una forma que te sorprende, pero ¿por qué no dejas de sorprenderte y atiendes a tu propia felicidad?”

“Because a thing is going strong now, it need not go strong forever . . . 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, and very early in the morning in the garden I feel that out house is the future as well as the past.”

“- Então não adivinhou -, disse, com um pouco de escárnio no seu terror. - Sou um indizível do tipo Oscar Wilde. - Os seus olhos fecharam-se, e levando os punhos cerrados até eles, ficou sentado imóvel, tendo apelado a César. Por fim, veio a sentença. Mal conseguia acreditar no que ouvia. Era «Tolices, tolices!». Estava à espera de muita coisa, mas não disto; pois se as suas palavras eram tolices, a sua vida era um sonho. --------------------------------------------------- P.181, MAURICE, E.M. FORSTER "So you've never guessed," he said, with a touch of scorn in his terror. "I'm an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort." His eyes closed, and driving clenched fists against them he sat motionless, having appealed to Caesar. At last judgement came. He could scarcely believe his ears. It was "Rubbish, rubbish!" He had expected many things, but not this; for if his words were rubbish his life was a dream.”

“Most of us are pseudo-scholars...for we are a very large and quite a powerful class, eminent in Church and State, we control the education of the Empire, we lend to the Press such distinction as it consents to receive, and we are a welcome asset at dinner-parties. Pseudo-scholarship is, on its good side, the homage paid by ignorance to learning. It also has an economic side, on which we need not be hard. Most of us must get a job before thirty, or sponge on our relatives, and many jobs can only be got by passing an exam. The pseudo-scholar often does well in examination (real scholars are not much good), and even when he fails he appreciates their inner majesty. They are gateways to employment, they have power to ban and bless. A paper on King Lear may lead somewhere, unlike the rather far-fetched play of the same name. It may be a stepping-stone to the Local Government Board. He does not often put it to himself openly and say, "That's the use of knowing things, they help you to get on." The economic pressure he feels is more often subconscious, and he goes to his exam, merely feeling that a paper on King Lear is a very tempestuous and terrible experience but an intensely real one. ...As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take the examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment were contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one be a penny the stupider.”

“I only know what it is that's wrong with him; not why it is." And what is it?" asked Lucy fearfully, expecting some harrowing tale. The old trouble; things won't fit." What things?" The things of the universe. It's quite true. They don't." Oh Mr. Emerson, whatever do you mean?" In his ordinary voice, so that she scarcely realized he was quoting poetry, he said: "'From far, from eve and morning, And yon twelve-winded sky, The stuff of life to knit me Blew hither: here am I." George and I both know this, but why does it distress him? We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all of life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us rather love one another, and work and rejoice. I don't believe in this world of sorrow.”

“The feudal ownership of land did bring dignity, whereas the modern ownership of movables is reducing us again to a nomadic horde. We are reverting to the civilisation 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. The Schlegels were certainly the poorer for the loss of Wickham Place. It had helped to balance their lives, and almost to counsel them. Nor is their ground-landlord spiritually the richer. He has built flats on its site, his motor-cars grow swifter, his exposures of Socialism more trenchant. But he has spilt the precious distillation of the years, and no chemistry of his can give it back to society again.”