E.M. Forster

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

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.

 

The so-called white races are really pinko-gray.

 

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. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the gray, sober against the fire.

 

[I]n the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life.

In daily life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists.

Truth is a flower in whose neighbourhood others must wither.

[Tolerance] is just a makeshift, suitable for an overcrowded and overheated planet. It carries on when love gives out, and love generally gives out as soon as we move away from our home and our friends.

[I]t is never possible for a novelist to deny time inside the fabric of his novel: he must cling, however lightly, to the thread of his story, he must touch the interminable tapeworm, otherwise he becomes unintelligible, which, in his case, is a blunder.

Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull.

We must exclude someone from our gathering, or we shall be left with nothing.

Romance only dies with life. No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of us. But there is a spurious sentiment which cannot resist the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque.

Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

Pity wraps the student of the past in an ambrosial cloud, and washes his limbs with eternal youth.

If only the sense of actuality can be lulled—and it sleeps for ever in most historians—there is no passion that cannot be gratified in the past.

Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work.

Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. We move between two darknesses.

The hungry and the homeless don’t care about liberty any more than they care about cultural heritage. To pretend that they do care is cant.

Florence she found perfectly sweet, Naples a dream, but very whiffy. In Rome one had simply to sit still and feel.

Intuition attracts those who wish to be spiritual without any bother, because it promises a heaven where the intuitions of others can be ignored.

Humility is a quality for which I have only a limited admiration. In many phases of life it is a great

It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals, and perhaps this is why History is so attractive to the more timid among us. We can recover self-confidence by snubbing the dead.

An efficiency-regime cannot be run without a few heroes stuck about it to carry off the dullness—much as plums have to be put into a bad pudding to make it palatable.

I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man’s pleasure when they come a cropper.

A novel is based on evidence, + or -x, the unknown quantity being the temperament of the novelist, and the unknown quantity always modifies the effect of the evidence, and sometimes transforms it entirely.

[I]t is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.

Failure or success seem to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wriggling, of fighting with their star or against it, and in the whole universe the only really interesting movement is this wriggle.

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible.

It is not that the Englishman can't feel—it is that he is afraid to feel. He has been taught at his public school that feeling is bad form. He must not express great joy or sorrow, or even open his mouth too wide when he talks—his pipe might fall out if he did.

Naked I came into the world, naked I shall go out of it! And a very good thing too, for it reminds me that I am naked under my shirt, whatever its colour.

The emotions may be endless. The more we express them, the more we may have to express.

We are all like Scheherazade’s husband, in that we want to know what happens next.

Although the novel exercises the rights of a created object, criticism has not those rights, and too many little mansions in English fiction have been acclaimed to their own detriment as important edifices.

A critic has no right to the narrowness which is the frequent prerogative of the creative artist.

We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.