Top 100 E M Forster Quotes
#1. There's never any knowing - how am I to put it? - which of our actions, which of our idlenesses won't have things hanging on it for ever. - E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread
Zadie Smith
#2. In order that two imperfect souls might touch perfection. E. M. Forster
Kimberly McCreight
#3. We all know that small cars are good for us. But so is cod liver oil. And jogging. I want to drive around in a Terminator, not the heroine in an E. M. Forster novel.
Jeremy Clarkson
#4. Most writers battle with periods of being blocked; it's almost an occupational hazard. But in the writing of his last and greatest novel, 'A Passage to India,' E. M. Forster got stuck for nine years.
Damon Galgut
#5. There are only two rules. One is E. M. Forster's guide to Alexandria; the best way to know Alexandria is to wander aimlessly. The second is from the Psalms; grin like a dog and run about through the city.
Jan Morris
#6. What foolsmiddle-classgirls are to expect other people to respect the same gods as themselves and E M Forster.
Margaret Drabble
#7. The ends of the earth, the depths of the sea, the darkness of time, you have chosen all three. - E. M. Forster
Ransom Riggs
#8. E.M. Forster, who said that if he had to choose between betraying his country and betraying his friend, he hoped he'd have the courage to betray his country.
Robert B. Parker
#9. He was driven to use the prerogatives of his profession, to act the parson.
E. M. Forster
#10. neck and collarbone and took a picture. Kiss me here. #atnight She pressed upload and then put the phone in her bag, walked out into the street and flagged a taxi.
Kate Forster
#11. Boys are marvellous creatures. Perhaps they will sink below the brutes; perhaps they will attain to a woman's tenderness.
E. M. Forster
#12. They travelled for thirteen hours down-hill, whilst the streams broadened and the mountains shrank, and the vegetation changed, and the people ceased being ugly and drinking beer, and began instead to drink wine and to be beautiful.
E. M. Forster
#13. But this is something new!' said Mrs. Munt, who collected new ideas as a squirrel collects nuts, and was especially attracted by those that are portable.
E. M. Forster
#14. Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.
E. M. Forster
#15. You just said it - you're back now. So how about you make it yourself?
Kate Forster
#16. The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.
E. M. Forster
#17. The novelist, unlike many of his colleagues, makes up a number of word-masses roughly describing himself (roughly: niceties shallcome later), gives them names and sex, assigns them plausible gestures, and causes them to speak by the use of inverted commas, and perhaps to behave consistently.
E. M. Forster
#18. Lucy was slow to follow what people said, but quick enough to detect what they meant. She missed Cecil's epigram, but grasped the feeling that prompted it.
E. M. Forster
#20. I believed in a return to Nature once. But how can we return to Nature when we have never been with her? Today, I believe that we must discover Nature. After many conquests we shall attain simplicity. It is our heritage.
E. M. Forster
#21. When real things are so wonderful, what is the point of pretending?
E. M. Forster
#22. No one is more triumphant than the man who chooses a worthy subject and masters all its facts.
E. M. Forster
#23. He seems to see good in every one. No one would take him for a clergyman.
E. M. Forster
#24. The interesting thing is that when you start out, people have no judgment and they see you young and fresh as a filmmaker - and because you have no experience yet, you're much more naive and think anything is possible.
Marc Forster
#25. I realized that a lot of the great directors that I admire from [Ingmar] Bergman to [Fredrico] Fellini re always shooting, then going into the editing room, and shooting again.
Marc Forster
#26. What the world most needs today are negative virtues - not minding people, not being huffy, touchy, irritable or revengeful.
E. M. Forster
#27. The middle age of buggers is not to be contemplated without horror.
E. M. Forster
#28. He had awoken too late for happiness, but not for strength, and could feel an austere joy, as of a warrior who is homeless but stands fully armed.
E. M. Forster
#29. Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still entangled with the desire for ownership.
E. M. Forster
#30. the more a Christian intentionally cultivates the joy of God in daily life, the more deeply embedded the joy of God will become in American civilization, through him.
Greg Forster
#31. Life' wrote a friend of mine, 'is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.
E. M. Forster
#32. What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
E. M. Forster
#33. Anyone can find places but finding people is a gift from God.
E. M. Forster
#34. The advance of regret can be so gradual that it is impossible to say yesterday I was happy, today I am not.
E. M. Forster
#35. Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?
E. M. Forster
#36. Oh, hang it all! what's the good - I mean, the good of living in a room for ever? There one goes on day after day, same old game, same up and down to town, until you forget there is any other game. You ought to see once in a way what's going on outside, if it's only nothing particular after all.
E. M. Forster
#37. Contrastingly to the new model of distribution, we shot Hand of God using the traditional format of film. I myself use very few apps and tend not to engage in social media. I do use Instagram under my production company's name, but that's it.
Marc Forster
#38. And he felt dubious and discontented suddenly, and wondered whether he was really and truly successful as a human being.
E. M. Forster
#39. He pushed against her, their hips grinding slowly, and it was Lyssa's turn to moan.
Kate Forster
#40. He had a theory that musicians are incredibly complex, and know far less than other artists what they want and what they are; that they puzzle themselves as well as their friends; that their psychology is a modern development, and has not yet been understood.
E. M. Forster
#41. It comes to this then: there always have been people like me and always will be, and generally they have been persecuted.
E. M. Forster
#42. ...The conversation had become unreal since Christianity had entered it. Ronny approved of religion as long as it endorsed the National Anthem, but he objected when it attempted to influence his life.
E. M. Forster
#43. At the side of the everlasting why, is a yes, and a yes, and a yes.
E. M. Forster
#44. Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work.
E. M. Forster
#45. Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.
E. M. Forster
#46. This desire to govern a woman
it lies very deep, and men and women must fight it together ... But I do love you surely in a better way then he does." He thought. "Yes
really in a better way. I want you to have your own thoughts even when I hold you in my arms.
E. M. Forster
#47. When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.
E. M. Forster
#48. Independence!" was a useful cry, and always saying we have not got it.
E. M. Forster
#49. It is so difficult - at least, I find it difficult - to understand people who speak the truth.
E. M. Forster
#50. Nature pulls one way and human nature another.
E. M. Forster
#51. No; look out for the part where you think you have done with the goblins and they come back,' breathed Helen, as the music started with a goblin walking quietly over the universe, from end to end.
E. M. Forster
#53. Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form.
E. M. Forster
#54. Give me life, with its struggles and victories, with its failures and hatreds, with its deep moral meaning and its unknown goal!
E. M. Forster
#55. He had brought out the man in Alec, and now it was Alec's turn to bring out the hero in him
E. M. Forster
#56. The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
Anthony Burgess
#58. But that some sonatas of Beethoven are written tragic no one can gainsay; yet they can triumph or despair as the player decides, and Lucy had decided that they should triumph.
E. M. Forster
#59. I feel like every time I take on a movie, it's important that the possibility of failure exists, and of the unknown, because it's a challenge to do something I haven't done before and something I have to try to work out.
Marc Forster
#60. There has been, is, and always will be every conceivable type of person.
E. M. Forster
#62. I think people, unfortunately, do live in constant fear.
Marc Forster
#63. I think the failure of The American church to affirm the goodness of civilizational life is our greatest failing today.
Greg Forster
#64. Frieda, you despise English music. You know you do. And English art. And English literature, except Shakespeare, and he's a German.
E. M. Forster
#65. Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.
E. M. Forster
#66. One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
E. M. Forster
#67. If you're willing to do it as good as you're willing to think up to do it, that's what your mind is there for, and you deliver excellence right now, now being the only moment you can control or do anything with or be creative with.
Robert Forster
#68. THE SIGNORA HAD NO business to do it," said Miss Bartlett, "no business at all. She promised us south rooms with a view close together, instead of which here are north rooms, looking into a court-yard, and a long way apart. Oh, Lucy!
E. M. Forster
#70. By the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes
a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.
E. M. Forster
#71. there's no cure for love, when it hits you make up your mind, to live with it!
Gwynne Forster
#72. Of all means to regeneration, Remorse is surely the most wasteful.
E. M. Forster
#73. All that is observable in a man-that is to say his actions and such of his spiritual existence as can be deduced from his actions-falls into the domain of history.
E. M. Forster
#74. I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.
E. M. Forster
#76. Nothing's the same for anyone. That's why life's this Hell, if you do a thing you're damned, and if you don't you're damned . . . .
E. M. Forster
#77. An acquaintance had become a lover, might become a husband, but would retain all that she had noted in the acquaintance; and love must confirm an old relation rather than reveal a new one.
E. M. Forster
#78. She had not died there. 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 measure the quick motions of man.
E. M. Forster
#79. If one doesn't worry, how does one understand?
E. M. Forster
#80. High born she might not be. But assuredly she cared about her ancestors,
E. M. Forster
#81. It's miles worse for you than that; I'm in love with your gamekeeper.
E. M. Forster
#82. Happiness in the ordinary sense is not what one needs in life, though one is right to aim at it. The true satisfaction is to come through, and see those whom one lives come through.
E. M. Forster
#83. What do you think of the Wilcoxes? Are they our sort? Are they likely people? Could they appreciate Helen, who is to my mind a very special sort of person? Do they care about Literature and Art? That is most important when you come to think of it. Literature and Art. Most important. How
E. M. Forster
#84. Man's feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong. Then I went further: it was then that I called to you for the first time, and you would not come.
E. M. Forster
#85. He had known so much about her once -what she thought, how she felt, the reasons for her actions. And now he only knew that he loved her, and all the other knowledge seemed passing from him just as he needed it most.
E. M. Forster
#86. Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land.
E. M. Forster
#88. If a man cannot lead up to passion, he can at all events lead down from it
E. M. Forster
#89. I only wish the poets would say this too: love is of the body; not the body, but of the the body. Ah! the misery that would be saved if we confessed that! Ah! for a little directness to liberate the soul!
E. M. Forster
#90. 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
#91. First time I ever played a bad guy. I didn't want to do it. I got stuck in bad guys for 13 years after that.
Robert Forster
#92. I'm a holy man minus the holiness. Hand that on to your three spies, and tell them to put it in their pipes.
E. M. Forster
#93. we may say that History develops, Art stands still
E. M. Forster
#94. I swear from the bottom of my heart I want to be healed. I want to be like other men, not this outcast whom nobody wants.
E. M. Forster
#95. Athletes, he believed, were simple, straightforward people, cruel and brutal if you like, but never petty. They knocked you down and hurt you, and then went on their way rejoicing.
E. M. Forster
#96. They chose to regard it as a miraculous preservation.
E. M. Forster
#97. Perhaps anything that he did would have pleased Lucy, but his awkwardness went straight to her heart.
E. M. Forster
#98. Hope, politeness, the blowing of a nose, the squeak of a boot, all produce boum.
E. M. Forster
#99. Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.
E. M. Forster
#100. Give, do not lend; after death who will thank you?
E. M. Forster
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