Top 100 Forster's Quotes
#1. 'Arctic Summer,' as you might know, is the title of Forster's one unfinished novel.
Damon Galgut
#2. 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
#3. I speculate over some of the Anglo nomenclature of birds: Wilson's snipe, Forster's tern ... : What natural images do these names conjure up in our minds? What integrity do we give back to the birds with our labels.
Terry Tempest Williams
#4. It's important to keep up with technology, to constantly move with it. Striving to do so keeps me alert and creates a sense of fluidity but at the same time I like to distance myself from it. It's key for my process to try and remain outside the bubble.
Marc Forster
#5. You confuse what's important with what's impressive.
E. M. Forster
#6. One's favorite book is as elusive as one's favorite pudding.
E. M. Forster
#7. Every shot is unique, even if it's just a close-up, an insert of your hand. You've got to work with the guy behind the lens to get it right, focus in. Those are critical little nothing things, but you've got to work with the people who are trying to put it down, in order to get it.
Robert Forster
#8. My dear sister, I can reassure you. Firstly, the beastly baby is Italian. Secondly, it was promptly christened at Santa Deodata's, and a powerful combination of saints watch over -
E. M. Forster
#9. One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister.
E. M. Forster
#10. 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
#11. The contest lay not between love and duty. Perhaps there never is such a contest. It lay between the real and the pretended, and Lucy's first aim was to defeat herself.
E. M. Forster
#12. Remember that it's only by going off the track that you get to know the country...And don't, let me beg you, go with that awful tourist idea that Italy's only a museum of antiquities and art. Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvelous than the land.
E. M. Forster
#13. For me, 'The Kite Runner' became about a guy who's emotionally shut down because he hasn't confronted his past.
Marc Forster
#14. Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's.
E. M. Forster
#16. 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
#17. You do care a little for me, I know ... but nothing to speak of, and you don't love me. I was yours once till death if you'd cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now ... and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked, and attend to your own happiness.
E. M. Forster
#18. She loved him with too clear a vision to fear his cloudiness
E. M. Forster
#20. When you boil it down, it's all a visual expression. In a sense we are all storytellers through what we wear, who we want to be, how we want people to perceive us. Life, people and the stories they consciously or unconsciously tell inspire me everyday.
Marc Forster
#21. Don't you think there are two great
things in life that we ought to aim at - truth and kindness? Let's
have both if we can, but let's be sure of having one or the other.
E. M. Forster
#22. I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's.
E. M. Forster
#23. They drove towards the city and Dan handed Lyssa a loose Hermes scarf.
'Yours?' she teased.
'Mum's,' he answered as Lyssa tied it over her eyes. 'You look very sexy like that.'
'And you sound really creepy right now,' Lyssa said, laughing.
Kate Forster
#24. There's never any great risk as long as you have money.
E. M. Forster
#25. I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man's pleasure when they come a cropper.
E. M. Forster
#26. Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.
E. M. Forster
#27. Well, you know what? The actor still gets up in the morning, if he's still got something to work with, you go out there and you do it. Never quit!
Robert Forster
#28. You want to love everyone equally, and that's worse than impossible
it's wrong.
E. M. Forster
#29. Self-pity ? I see no moral objections to it, the smell drives people away, but that's a practical objection, and occasionally an advantage.
E. M. Forster
#30. They too entered the world of dreams- that world in which a third of each man's life is spent, and which is thought by some pessimists to be a premonition of eternity.
E. M. Forster
#31. Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. We move between two darkness's.
E. M. Forster
#32. We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.
E. M. Forster
#33. And then he kissed her. Slow and easy, just their mouths touching, and then he felt her tongue. He let his join hers as they explored each other's mouths.
Kate Forster
#34. It all turns on affection now," said Margaret. "Affection. Don't you see?... And affection, when reciprocated, gives rights. Put that down in your notebook, Mr. Mansbridge. It's a useful formula.
E. M. Forster
#35. A mirror does not develop because an historical pageant passes in front of it. It only develops when it gets a fresh coat of quicksilver in other words, when it acquires new sensitiveness; and the novel's success lies in its own sensitiveness, not in the success of its subject matter.
E. M. Forster
#36. Ladies sheltering behind men, men sheltering behind servants - the whole system's wrong, and she must challenge it.
E. M. Forster
#37. It's what you do every time. You isolate what you know, and you create a mental image of what you're doing. Every time you speak you don't have to think about it. Words come out of your mouth based on what you know. That's the same job every time.
Robert Forster
#38. All a child's life depends on the ideal it has of its parents. Destroy that and everything goes - morals, behavior, everything. Absolute trust in someone else is the essence of education.
E. M. Forster
#39. I don't think people understand what it takes to make a movie unless they've experienced it themselves or been around it. It's a miracle every time you make a movie, and a bigger miracle if it turns out well.
Marc Forster
#40. Love felt and returned, love which our bodies exact and our hearts have transfigured, love which is the most real thing that we shall ever meet, reappeared now as the world's enemy, and she must stifle it.
E. M. Forster
#41. But it is sometimes as difficult to lose one's temper as it is difficult at other times to keep it.
E. M. Forster
#42. As I said, either friends or the country, some . . . either some very dear person or some very dear place seems necessary to relieve life's daily grey, and to show that it is grey. If possible, one should have both.
E. M. Forster
#43. You care for me a little bit, I do think," he admitted, "but I can't hang all my life on a little bit. You don't. You hang yours on Anne. You don't worry whether your relation with her is platonic or not, you only know it's big enough to hang a life on.
E. M. Forster
#44. Perhaps it was Helen's way of falling in love--a curious way to Margaret, whose agony and whose contempt of Henry were yet imprinted with his image. Helen forgot people. They were husks that had enclosed her emotion.
E. M. Forster
#45. Ronny's religion was of the sterilized Public School brand, which never goes bad, even in the tropics. Wherever he entered, mosque, cave or temple, he retained the spiritual outlook of the fifth form, and condemned as 'weakening' any attempt to understand them.
E. M. Forster
#46. But I have seen my obstacles: trivialities, learning and poetry. This last needs explaining: the old artist's readiness to dissolve characters into a haze. Characters cannot come alive and fight and guide the world unless the novelist wants them to remain characters.
E. M. Forster
#47. reminded me on Friday night that we aren't friends, Cressida, and I would like you to remember that now,' she snapped. 'So why don't you go and make someone else feel crap about their life and then when you're done with that, go and look for your boyfriend's chin,
Kate Forster
#48. A slow nature such as Maurice's appears insensitive, for it needs time even to feel.
E. M. Forster
#49. He lived on, miserable and misunderstood, as before, and increasingly lonely. One cannot write those words too often: Maurice's loneliness: it increased.
E. M. Forster
#50. It's not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts.
E. M. Forster
#51. One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's own emotions.
E. M. Forster
#53. 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
#54. It's miles worse for you than that; I'm in love with your gamekeeper.
E. M. Forster
#55. 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
#56. there's no cure for love, when it hits you make up your mind, to live with it!
Gwynne Forster
#57. 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
#58. 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
#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. 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
#61. He pushed against her, their hips grinding slowly, and it was Lyssa's turn to moan.
Kate Forster
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. Petty unselfishness," she repeated. "I had got an idea that every one here spent their lives in making little sacrifices for objects they didn't care for, to please people they didn't love; that they never learnt to be sincere - and, what's as bad, never learnt how to enjoy themselves.
E. M. Forster
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.
E. M. Forster
#69. You just said it - you're back now. So how about you make it yourself?
Kate Forster
#70. Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.
E. M. Forster
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. Boys are marvellous creatures. Perhaps they will sink below the brutes; perhaps they will attain to a woman's tenderness.
E. M. Forster
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. He was driven to use the prerogatives of his profession, to act the parson.
E. M. Forster
#77. I don't like taking from anyone. I'd rather be a giver, though not for any worthy reason. It's about control, obviously. If I give, I control; if I take, I am controlled. If someone offers me something for free I am at once suspicious.
Margaret Forster
#78. I had four children, we all had to struggle to get up and get educated, and they all did their part, and we all did the best we could, and that's what a family and a parent is supposed to do.
Robert Forster
#79. 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
#80. There had always been something to worry him ever since he could remember, always something that distracted him in the pursuit of beauty. For he did pursue beauty, and, therefore, Margaret's speeches did flutter away from him like birds.
E. M. Forster
#81. If you pass life by it's jolly well going to pass you by in the future. If you're frightened it's all right--that's no harm; fear is an emotion.
E. M. Forster
#82. I seem fated to pass through the world without colliding with it or moving it - and I'm sure I can't tell you whether the fate's good or evil. I don't die - I don't fall in love. And if other people die or fall in love they always do it when I'm just not there.
E. M. Forster
#83. The job is trying to create movie shots that have depth, that have the meanings you need them to have, and then good enough so that they will add something to the final picture. They will make the picture; they'll get into the picture, and give them what they need. It's an interesting job.
Robert Forster
#84. Don't brood too much," she wrote to Helen, "on the superiority of the unseen to the seen. It's true, but to brood on it is medieval. Our business is not to contrast the two, but to reconcile them.
E. M. Forster
#85. This is Ahab, that's Jezebel," said Evie, who was one of those who name animals after the less successful characters of Old Testament history.
E. M. Forster
#86. He educated Maurice, or rather his spirit educated Maurice's spirit, for they themselves became equal. Neither thought "Am I led; am I leading?" Love had caught him out of triviality and Maurice out of bewilderment in order that two imperfect souls might touch perfection.
E. M. Forster
#87. I write in the morning, I walk in the afternoon and I read in the evening. It's a very easy, lovely life.
Margaret Forster
#88. for Fr Bede, a contemplative lifestyle in which one seeks to deepen one's consciousness of God was much more important than having an articulate and theologically accurate explanation of one's spirituality.
Dion A. Forster
#89. This outer life, though obviously horrid; often seems the real one - there's grit in it. It does breed character. Do personal relations lead to sloppiness in the end?
E. M. Forster
#90. People talk about escapism as though it's something nasty but escapism is wonderful!
Margaret Forster
#91. ... And now we shan't be parted no more, and that's finished.
E. M. Forster
#92. Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.
E. M. Forster
#93. I always think it's interesting to switch genres, because if I read a script and I know exactly how to manifest a story, I don't really want to do it anymore, because I've already done it in my head.
Marc Forster
#94. He had robbed the body of its taint, the world's taunts of their sting; he had shown her the holiness of direct desire.
E. M. Forster
#95. It's better to be fooled than to be suspicious - that the confidence trick is the work of man, but the want-of-confidence trick is the work of the devil.
E. M. Forster
#96. Genius is the power of lighting one's own fire!
John Forster
#97. There's nothing like a debate to teach one quickness. I often wish I had gone in for them when I was a youngster. It would have helped me no end.
E. M. Forster
#98. There's enough sorrow in the world, isn't there, without trying to invent it.
E. M. Forster
#99. Man is the measure. That was my first lesson. 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.
E. M. Forster
#100. Every little trifle for some reason does seem incalculably important today and when you say of a thing that "nothing hangs on it" it sounds like blasphemy. 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 forever.
E. M. Forster
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