E. M. Forster - A Room with a View (1908)

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When we were only acquaintances, you let me be myself, but now you're always protecting me... I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. Can't I be trusted to face the truth but I must get it second-hand through you? A woman's place!

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
I cannot help thinking that there is something to admire in everyone, even if you do not approve of them.

E. M. Forster
Man has to pick up the use of his functions as he goes along- especially the function of Love.

E. M. Forster
Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?

E. M. Forster
If we act the truth the people who really love us are sure to come back to us in the long run

E. M. Forster
It isn't possible to love and to 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 from experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.

E. M. Forster
There's enough sorrow in the world, isn't there, without trying to invent it.

E. M. Forster
Do you suppose there's any difference between spring in nature and spring in man? But there we go, praising the one and condemning the other as improper, ashamed that the same laws work eternally through both.

E. M. Forster
It was not exactly that a man had died; something had happened to the living: they had come to a situation where character tells, and where childhood enters upon the branching paths of Youth.

E. M. Forster
We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.

E. M. Forster
Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.

E. M. Forster
It is obvious enough for the reader to conclude, "She loves young Emerson." A reader in Lucy's place would not find it obvious. Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice, and we welcome "nerves" or any other shibboleth that will cloak our personal desire. She loved Cecil; George made her nervous; will the reader explain to her that the phrases should have been reversed?

E. M. Forster
Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.

E. M. Forster