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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.

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
Goes
Resist
Dies
Pairs
Cannot
Sentiments
Incongruous
Better
Sooner
Spurious
Ever
Unexpected
Loosen
Life
Pull
Grotesque
Romance
Sentiment
Touch
Pair

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But I have seen my obstacles: trivialities, learning and poetry. This last needs explaining: the old artist's readiness to dissolve characters into a haze. Characters cannot come alive and fight and guide the world unless the novelist wants them to remain characters.
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When that strange race nears the dust and is condemned as untouchable, then nature remembers the physical perfection that she accomplished elsewhere, and throws out a god-not many, but one here and there, to prove to society how little its categories impress her.
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By the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes--a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.
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Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.
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Ideas are fatal to caste.
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When love flies it is remembered not as love but as something else. Blessed are the uneducated, who forget it entirely, and are never conscious of folly or pruriency in the past, of long aimless conversations.
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Are not beauty and delicacy the same?
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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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But after all, what have we to do with taverns? Real menace belongs to the drawing-room.
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I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult.
E. M. Forster
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Ah, but you see, I didn't want to be fair.
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Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something vulgarity, concealing something.
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Love felt and returned, love which our bodies exact and our hearts have transfigured, love which is the most real thing that we shall ever meet, reappeared now as the world's enemy, and she must stifle it.
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She only felt that the candle would burn better, the packing go easier, the world be happier, if she could give and receive some human love.
E. M. Forster
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There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.
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Hope, politeness, the blowing of a nose, the squeak of a boot, all produce boum.
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Aziz winked at him slowly and said: “...There are many ways of being a man mine is to express what is deepest in my heart.
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For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better.
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The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.
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She loved him absolutely, perhaps for half an hour.
E. M. Forster