The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.
E. M. FORSTERWe cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won’t do harm – yes, choose a place where you won’t do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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You told me once that we shall be judged by our intentions, not by our accomplishments. I thought it a grand remark. But we must intend to accomplish – not sit intending on a chair.
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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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I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.
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At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
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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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We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
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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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It isn’t possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.
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But the body is deeper than the soul and its secrets inscrutable.
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It was pleasant, too, to fling wide the windows, pinching the fingers in unfamiliar fastenings, to lean out into sunshine with beautiful hills and trees and marble churches opposite, and, close below, Arno, gurgling against the embankment of the road.
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Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
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Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
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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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To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.
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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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The emotions may be endless. The more we express them, the more we may have to express.
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Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.
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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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I can only do what’s easy. I can only entice and be enticed. I can’t, and won’t, attempt difficult relations. If I marry it will either be a man who’s strong enough to boss me or whom I’m strong enough to boss.
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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.
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Money pads the edges of things.
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One has two duties – to be worried and not to be worried.
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Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.
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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.
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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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Life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t’other from which . . .
E. M. FORSTER