E. M. Forster - Death Quotes

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Pain is good, I'd say, when it's incidental to Love. In 'I give up my life for my friend' it is my friend, not my death, that matters. And sometimes I needn't give up my life for him, I can live for him, and with him, and the power of the spirit is then equally manifested, I should think.

E. M. Forster
The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.

E. M. Forster
I have very strongly of late the wish that others may be as sensitive as myself and the fear that they will not be. Colleague Sir Frank Adcock stumped by the sunset-portent unheeding. And I can't arge that I gain, or that others would gain, anything for humanity by observing and recording what went on for a few moments in the sky on Boar Race evening. I sometimes pretend to myself that I am public-spirited. I am not. I am an hedonist who wants pleasant sensations. On the other hand I am not the usual type of hedonist, for I want sensations to be had – if not by myself, then by someone else. The show shouldn't end with my death, which becomes a minor boo-hoo.

E. M. Forster
People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness.

E. M. Forster
Take an old man's word; there's nothing worse than a muddle in all the world. It is easy to face Death and Fate, and the things that sound so dreadful. It is on my muddles that I look back with horror - on the things that I might have avoided. We can help one another but little. I used to think I could teach young people the whole of life, but I know better now, and all my teaching of George has come down to this: beware of muddle.

E. M. Forster
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
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.

E. M. Forster
Death is nothing if one can approach it as such. I was just a tiny night-light, suffocated in its own wax, and on the point of expiring.

E. M. Forster
I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's.

E. M. Forster
A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man.

E. M. Forster
Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him.

E. M. Forster