Sometimes I think too much fuss is made about marriage. Century after century of carnal embracement and we’re still no nearer to understanding one another.
E. M. FORSTERSchool was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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I think you’re beautiful, the only beautiful person I’ve ever seen. I love your voice and everything to do with you, down to your clothes or the room you are sitting in. I adore you.
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Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.
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But the body is deeper than the soul and its secrets inscrutable.
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Money pads the edges of things.
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She had been so wicked that in all her life she had done only one good deed-given an onion to a beggar. So she went to hell. As she lay in torment she saw the onion, lowered down from heaven by an angel. She caught hold of it. He began to pull her up.
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People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness.
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A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
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One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.
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I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them. It’s one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place.
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Give, do not lend; after death who will thank you?
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If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
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Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
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Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time – beautiful?
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The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.
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Don’t be mysterious; there isn’t the time.
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Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talks that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence.
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The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.
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If we act the truth the people who really love us are sure to come back to us in the long run
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The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world.
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Outside the arch, always there seemed another arch. And beyond the remotest echo, a silence.
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One has two duties – to be worried and not to be worried.
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Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work.
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You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.
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I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.
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Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate.
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At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
E. M. FORSTER