E. M. Forster Quotes

For one who is indifferent, life itself is a prison. Any sense of community is external or, even worse, nonexistent. Thus, indifference means solitude. Those who are indifferent do not see others. They feel nothing for others and are unconcerned with what might happen to them. They are surrounded by a great emptiness. Filled by it, in fact. They are devoid of all hope as well as imagination. In other words, devoid of any future.

They were here all at once, but not together. Survival took self-absorption, and it made them strangers with nothing to do and no way to relate. Emergencies gave you a shape and a plot to take part in, while death was no story at all. It left you nothing.

I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature.

Reality was utterly coolheaded and utterly lonely.

The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.

Maybe existence is ultimately a lonely thing.

It's lonely up here.

I don't know what's the matter with me, why I'm so adept at distance, why I feel so remote from things, why life feels like a rumor.

Friends: not one. Just a few acquaintances who imagine they feel something for me and who might be sorry if a train ran over me and the funeral was on a rainy day.

Being a stranger was like being dead, and brought to mind how, in a book he had read that most folks misunderstood one common state: The flip side of love is indifference, not hate.

The loneliness of a one night stand is hard to take.

Friendship is but a name. I love no one.

... we are all terribly alone no matter what people say.

I wonder if I shall ever see her again, and I realize that I scarcely care. I can feel the sheets beneath me, and the cold air on my chest. I feel fine. I feel absolutely fine. I feel nothing at all.

I wandered off, walking through streets that seemed emptier than ever, thinking that if I didn't stop, if I kept on walking, I wouldn't notice that the world I thought I knew was no longer there.

There were people everywhere but no one was mine, and I was no one's.

No one has the least regard for the man; with them all, he has been an object of avoidance, suspicion, and aversion; but the spark of life within him is curiously separable from himself now, and they have a deep interest in it, probably because it IS life, and they are living and must die.

I want to be alone. Sympathies wasted on my hollow shell. I feel there's nothing left to fight for. No reason for a cause.

I am alone in this white, garden-rimmed street. Alone and free. But this freedom is rather like death.

I don’t care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual.

I could picture life—school and everything else—continuing on without me. But I could not picture my funeral. Not at all. Mostly because I couldn’t imagine who would attend or what they would say.

The hollowness was in his arms and the world was snowing.

I am entirely alone. I and my shadow fill the universe.

I am out of humanity's reach.I must finish my journey alone,Never hear the sweet music of speech;I start at the sound of my own.

I am nothing. I’m like someone who’s been thrown into the ocean at night, floating all alone. I reach out, but no one is there. I call out, but no one answers. I have no connection to anything.