Fed by neither Heaven nor by Earth he was going forward. . . He hadn't a God or a lover--the two usual incentives to virtue. But on he struggled with his back to ease, because dignity demanded it. There was no one to watch him, nor did he watch himself, but struggles like his are the supreme achievements of humanity, and surpass any legends about Heaven.

— E.M. Forster

Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul.

— E.M. Forster

Food, the stoking-up process, the keeping alive of an individual flame, the process that begins before birth and is continued after it by the mother, and finally taken over by the individual himself, who goes on day after day putting an assortment of objects into a hole in his face without becoming surprised or bored.

— E.M. Forster

For a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and—by some sad, strange irony—it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy.

— E.M. Forster

For the dead, who seem to take away so much, really take with them nothing that is ours.

— E.M. Forster

George had turned at the sound of her arrival. For a moment he contemplated her, as one who had fallen out of heaven. He saw radiant joy in her face, he saw the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves. The bushes above them closed. He stepped quickly forward and kissed her. Before she could speak, almost before she could feel, a voice called 'Lucy! Lucy! Lucy!' The silence of life had been broken by Miss Bartlett, who stood brown against the view.

— E.M. Forster

Gray clouds were charging across tissues of white, which stretched and shredded and tore slowly, until through their final layers there gleamed a hint of the disappearing blue. Summer was retreating. The wind roared, the trees groaned, yet the noise seemed insufficient for those vast operations in heaven. The weather was breaking up, breaking, broken, and it is a sense of the fit rather than of the supernatural that equips such crises with the salvos of angelic artillery.

— E.M. Forster

Had he lived some centuries ago, in the brightly colored civilizations of the past, he would have had a definite status, his rank and his income would have corresponded? But in his day the angel of Democracy had arisen, enshadowing the classes with leather wings, and proclaiming, "All men are equal--all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas...

— E.M. Forster

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

— E.M. Forster

Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time - beautiful?

— E.M. Forster