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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 right: love is eternal.

E. M. Forster

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E. M. Forster
Age: 91 †
Born: 1879
Born: January 1
Died: 1970
Died: June 7
Biographer
Essayist
Librettist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
London
England
Edward Morgan Forster
E Forster
EM Forster
Never
Romance
Love
Poet
Eternal
Transmute
Possible
Muddle
Wish
Poets
Experience
Ignore
Part
Pull
Right
Romantic

More quotes by E. M. Forster

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Don't be mysterious there isn't the time.
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Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?
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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. A touch will loosen it, and the sooner it goes from us the better.
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Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.
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If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.
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All this fame and money, which have so thrilled me when they came to others, leave me cold when they come to me. I am not an ascetic, but I don't know what to do with them, and my daily life has never been so trying, and there is no one to fill it emotionally.
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The advance of regret can be so gradual that it is impossible to say yesterday I was happy, today I am not.
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Pathos, piety, courage, they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.
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In the creative state a man is taken out of himself.
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Towns are after all excrescences, grey fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.
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Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
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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 ever, full of woods some of them, and arched with majestic sky and a friend. . .
E. M. Forster
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All invitations must proceed from heaven perhaps perhaps it is futile for men to initiate their own unity, they do but widen the gulfs between them by the attempt.
E. M. Forster
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Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
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The present flowed by them like a stream. The tree rustled. It had made music before they were born, and would continue after their deaths, but its song was of the moment. The moment had passed. The tree rustled again. Their senses were sharpened, and they seemed to apprehend life. Life passed. The tree rustled again.
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Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due - she reminds us too much of a prima donna.
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Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!
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[...] it is right to be kind and even sacrifice ourselves to people who need kindness and lie in our way - otherwise, besides failing to help them, we run into the aridity of self-development. To seek for recipients of one's goodness, to play the Potted Jesus leads to the contray the Christian danger.
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For it is a serious thing to have been watched. We all radiate something curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone.
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They cared for no one, they were outside humanity, and death, had it come, would only have continued their pursuit of a retreating horizon.
E. M. Forster