E. M. Forster Quotes (1879-1970)

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

“It is now only in letters I write what I feel: not in literature any more, and I seldom say it, because I keep trying to be amusing.”

“Whether Parliament is either a representative body or an efficient one is questionable, but I value it because it criticizes and talks, and because its chatter gets widely reported. So two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three.”

“As for 'story' I never yet did enjoy a novel or play in which someone didn't tell me afterward that there was something wrong with the story, so that's going to be no drawback as far as I'm concerned. "Good Lord, why am I so bored"—"I know; it must be the plot developing harmoniously." So I often reply to myself, and there rises before me my special nightmare—that of the writer as craftsman, natty and deft.”

“Edward Carpenter was born at Brighton one hundred years ago. Few people recall him to-day, and those who do probably dismiss him as a crank. But he was a remarkable fellow, lovable, charming, energetic, courageous, possibly great, and he was once an inspiration in the world of Labour. He deserves commemoration.”

“Just now I am enthralled by Gibbon's Autobiography. There are passages in it that are more than "correct", and on the border line of beauty. What a giant he is—greatest historian & greatest figure name of the 18th century I say; whether it is his greatness or his remoteness that makes his goings on with religion so queer I do not know.”

“Nature, whom I used to be keen on, is too unfair.  She evokes plenty of high & exhausting feelings, and offers nothing in return.”

“He has the strength (and of course the limitations) of the recluse, who, though not afraid of the world, always stands at a slight angle to it.”

“Rose Macaulay is a wise guide, tolerant, generous-minded, liberal, courageous, cheerful, and her judgments of society and social values are always sound.”

“On we read, confusing the characters with the incidents and neglecting the outcome, but tickled by the images and the turns of the talk. It is frivolous stuff, and how rare, how precious is frivolity! How few writers can prostitute all their powers!”

“His great novel The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) has certainly enlarged my life – an unusual experience for a life which is well on in its eighties. Reading and rereading it has made me realize how many ways there are of being alive, how many doors there are, close to one, which someone else's touch may open.”

“Novelists too — they practise the friendly unpatronising tone ; Christopher Isherwood’s Mr. Norris changes Trains is an example of this. Isherwood — who is extremely intelligent — always writes as if the reader were equally intelligent. He is an example of democratic good manners. He trusts his public”

“Now he is dead, and the low-brows whom he scandalized have united with the high-brows whom he bored to ignore his greatness. This cannot be helped; no one who alienates both Mrs Grundy and Aspatia [sic] can hope for a good obituary press. All that we can do...is to say straight out that he was the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation. The rest must be left where he would have wished it to be left – in the hands of the young.”

“They (the Nazis) would put it to our young people that our best writers were Nazis at heart, and so try to warp their minds. It is interesting, in this connextion, to read what Nazi critics have been saying lately about Shakespeare and Carlyle. They have not got a bad case over Carlyle - he had something of the Nazi about him: he despised individualism and liberty and worshipped the dictator-hero. However, Carlyle also said "Thought is stronger than artillery-parks", and this side of him the Nazis don't mention.”

“Why do the characters in Jane Austen give us a slightly new pleasure each time they come in, as opposed to the merely repetitive pleasure that is caused by a character in Dickens? Why do they combine so well in a conversation, and draw one another out, without seeming to do so, and never perform? The answer to this question can be put in several ways; that, unlike Dickens, she was a real artist, that she never stooped to caricature, etc. But the best reply is that her characters, though smaller than his, are more highly organized. They function all round, and even if her plot made greater demands on them than it does, they would still be adequate.”

“You ask about Rupert Brooke. Considering we were on Christian name terms, I did not know him well, though enough to contradict the legends that the press are weaving round his name him. He was serene, humorous, intelligent and beautiful—as charming an acquaintance as one could desire—and latterly most friendly. But he was essentially hard; his hatred of slosh went rather too deep and affected the eternal water-springs, and I don't envy anyone who applied to him for sympathy. The sonnets, on which his reputation is evidently to be based, differ from all his previous work, which was rebellious and unorthodox. They were inspired by his romantic thoughts about war, not by his knowledge of it; that also, had he been spared to gain it, he was hoping to express, and, knowing his grim and grotesque realism, I feel sure that he would have expressed something besides the Holiness in which—to me so inappropriately—his work concludes. I don't know whether the above conveys anything to you. If it errs on the side of unkindness he himself wouldn't like it the less, for he was extraordinarily free of conceit and sincerely desired to be done by as he did. But he goes down to posterity as a sort of St Sebastian, haloed by the Dean of St Paul's, and hymned by the Morning Post as the evangelist of anti-Germanism. As far as I dare speak for Rupert, how he would hate it, or rather laugh at it.”

“"Only connect...", the motto of Howards End, might be the lesson of all his work. His heroes and heroines...are the precursors of the left-wing young people of today; he can be used by them as a take-off in whatever direction they would develop... Much of his art consists in the plain-ness of his writing, for he is certain of the truth of his convictions and the force of his emotions.”

“M. [Forster] says he would much rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave...”

“"Two Cheers for Democracy"...[made] a considerable impression. It annoyed many, both orthodox patriots and orthodox Marxists, but they felt outmanoeuvred by it. And many others, sickened of "commitment" by the betrayals and confusions of the Spanish civil war, found it a great support and recognized a heroism in its facing of limitations.”

“Consider...the situation in Britain in this century. After Joyce and Virginia Woolf, fiction of any quality seemed to die out. Such puny men as D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster acquired the status of giants.”

“I hardly remember such another disappointment, and I try to analyze why, when Where Angels Fear to Tread was so very promising, and when A Room with a View seemed to advance that promise, Howard's End makes one fear that no good thing will come of these anticipations. I think it is due to the author's having listened to the people who (may have) said that he should give more "story," and that he should be coarse in morals, and that he should coruscate in style. But these three things are not native to him, and so the man who gave us before such delicate and faithful studies of character, and who wrote so simply, now produces a book (which has many details of merit, but) which, taken as a whole, is sensational and dirty and affected. I should like to know what you think of the new craze for introducing into fiction the high-bred maiden who has a baby? It is the craze of the moment; it is beginning to attract the wonder of the Continent... The French, who allow themselves every other aberration, have at least preserved their horror of this one, which never occurs in their novels. I think it is a mark of feminisation... I do not know how an Englishman can calmly write of such a disgusting thing, with such sang-froid. If you will look at Chapter 40 of Howard's End and will put it side by side with an incident in real life, forcibly, without literature or cant, you will feel the gooseflesh rise upon you.”

“It is characteristic of Mr. Forster, to whom the Lares are living gods and the garden wych-elm a Hamadryad, that he titles his book after a house wherein personal relations ought to matter but are routed by telegrams and anger. For such a quality, and for the true comic sense with which he renders colloquial speech to betray cunning shadowings of personality in the speakers, the word Forsterian is already demanded. But "Howards End" is too big a thing to be either set aside or grappled to our souls at once; it will have to find its level after repeated regustation: such writing demands such reading.”

“When the newspapers compare Chamberlain to Abe Lincoln and Jesus Christ, they aren't being in the least sacrilegious; because their Lincoln and their Christ are utter phonies, anyhow. The newspapers are moved to tears by the spectacle of a gentleman standing his ground against a non-gentleman. So they call him 'England'. Well, my 'England' is E.M.; the anti-heroic hero, with his straggly straw moustache, his light gay blue baby-eyes and his elderly stoop. Instead of a folded umbrella or a brown uniform, his emblems are his tweed cap (which is too small for him) and the odd-shaped brown paper parcels in which he carries his belongings from country to town and back again. While the others tell their followers to be ready to die, he advises us to live as if we were immortal. And he really does this himself, although he is as anxious and afraid as any of us, and never for an instant pretends not to be. He and his books and what they stand for are all that is truly worth saving from Hitler; and the vast majority of people on this island aren't even aware that he exists.”

“He has quite lost the touch of preciousness, of exaggerated care for nature and the relationships of human beings, that faintly irritate some readers of his earlier books. He used once to write at times too much as a graduate (even occasionally as an undergraduate) of King's College, Cambridge (perhaps the most civilized place in the world), who has had an amour with Italy and another with the god Pan. In A Passage to India (as, indeed, in Howards End), Pan is only implicit, the mysterious is more diffused, the imagination at once richer, less fantastic, and more restrained. It is a novel that from most novelists would be an amazing piece of work. Coming from Mr. Forster, it is not amazing, but it is, I think, the best and most interesting book he has written.”

“No government, no big organization, will pay for the truth. To take a crude example: can you imagine the British Government commissioning E. M. Forster to write A Passage to India? He could only write it because he was not dependent on State aid.”

“She thinks the one place where you can transcend your own tribalism, and daily politics, is through the novel. Just so long, she says, as it avoids preachiness. She cites A Passage to India, one of her favourite books. "It's a political novel and the politics are dead and obsolete; and yet the book goes on and on. And because it's a political book it has a tremendous moral and didactic message, and yet it so transcends the teaching aspect of it that it seems to me the most remarkable model for what a novel should be, when you want to say something with a 'message'. Otherwise if it has a message, the hell with it."”

“Forster...perceived, and, as far as it can be done at all, described, that sense of hallucination which pervades India. "Nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else." As I once heard it remarked of the rope-trick, "it is essentially Indian, because no such trick ever existed". The English in India, for all their doing and striving, became part of that hallucination. The Raj itself (without intending the pun) was a mirage; a dream which British and Indians dreamed together and which individuals will still dream again when they meet, long, long after other dreams and other hallucinations have succeeded. Leave out Forster's pasteboard figures of fun, and his physical descriptions of scenes and cities evoke the dream as they only could if someone who also felt it had written them.”

“For the Wilcoxes are England; they contain more of the essence of England even than Sunday afternoons, or Lords, or Sir William Bull.”