Daily Inspiration Quote by E. M. Forster

Forster is hunting a lyric that refuses to sit still long enough to be owned. “Objects man can’t touch” reads like a deliberate provocation: poetry, for him, isn’t a decorative layer pasted onto the material world but something lodged in the intangible infrastructure of living - mood, intimacy, memory, moral courage, the half-sensed meanings that flicker between people and then vanish the moment you try to pin them down.

The phrasing is slyly anti-collector. “Objects” suggests solidity, the museum case, the gentleman’s cabinet of curiosities; “can’t touch” yanks that solidity away. That tension is classic Forster: a novelist of rooms, class markers, and social scripts who keeps insisting the real drama happens off the ledger. In Edwardian England, where taste and property could masquerade as virtue, the line performs a quiet rebellion. It refuses the era’s confidence that what matters can be measured, inherited, displayed.

Subtextually, it’s also a defense of art against the utilitarian bargain: if something can’t be converted into status or profit, it must be frivolous. Forster flips that. The untouchable is precisely where value hides. You can feel the kinship with his larger ethic - only connect - where the most consequential “objects” are relational: trust, tenderness, the private recognition that crosses a room without permission.

As a novelist, he’s also smuggling in a craft note. Fiction’s job isn’t just to photograph surfaces; it’s to render the pressure system around them, the invisible weather. Forster isn’t rejecting the physical world so much as warning that touching isn’t the same as knowing.