E.M. Forster

“Why children?' he asked. 'Why always children? For love to end where it begins is far more beautiful, and Nature knows it.”

“Books have to be read (worse luck, for it takes a long time); it is the only way of discovering what they contain.”

“The Waves is an extraordinary achievement ... It is trembling on the edge. A little less - and it would lose its poetry. A little more - and it would be over into the abyss, and be dull and arty. It is her greatest book.”

“Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off, but opening out.”

“Margaret had often wondered at the disturbance that takes place in the world's waters when Love, who seems so tiny a pebble, slips in. Whom does Love concern beyond the beloved and the lover? Yet his impact deluges a hundred shores,”

“The historian records, but the novelist creates.”

“Love had failed. Love was an emotion through which you occasionally enjoyed yourself. it could not do things.”

“They must live outside class, without relations or money; they must work and stick to each other till death. But England belonged to them. That, besides companionship, was their reward. Her air and sky were theirs, not the timorous millions' who own stuffy little boxes, but never their own souls.”

“This desire to govern a woman -- it lies very deep, and men and women must fight it together.... But I do love you surely in a better way then he does." He thought. "Yes -- really in a better way. I want you to have your own thoughts even when I hold you in my arms.”

“My father says that there is only one perfect view — the view of the sky straight over our heads, and that all these views on earth are but bungled copies of it.”

“I think everyone fails, but there are so many kinds of failure.”

“There stood a young man who had the figure of a Greek athlete and the face of an English one...Just where he began to be beautiful the clothes started.”

“An acquaintance had become a lover, might become a husband, but would retain all that she had noted in the acquaintance; and love must confirm an old relation rather than reveal a new one.”

“After all, is not a real Hell better than a manufactured Heaven?”

“It is not rubbish! It is the part of people that you do not understand.”

“Mr Abrahams was a preparatory schoolmaster of the old-fashioned sort. He cared neither for work nor games, but fed his boys well and saw that they did not misbehave. The rest he left to the parents, and did not speculate how much the parents were leaving to him. Amid mutual compliments the boys passed out into a public school, healthy but backward, to receive upon undefended flesh the first blows of the world.”

“A matter neither sensual nor sensational is ignored by the art of today.”

“They chose to regard it as a miraculous preservation.”

“You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried the other. "I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but not everything.”

“In daily life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists. We know each other approximately, by external signs, and these serve well enough as a basis for society and even for intimacy. But people in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed. And this is why they often seem more definite than characters in history, or even our own friends; we have been told all about them that can be told; even if they are imperfect or unreal they do not contain any secrets, whereas our friends do and must, mutual secrecy being one of the conditions of life upon this globe.”