So I shan’t ever marry, for there aren’t such men. And Heaven help any one whom I do marry, for I shall certainly run away from him before you can say ‘Jack Robinson.
E. M. FORSTERI 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.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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Human relations are impossible. When they are real they are uncomfortable, and when they are comfortable they are unreal. It was for the journey into solitude that the human soul was created.
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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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Think before you speak is criticism’s motto; speak before you think, creation’s.
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Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?
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Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.
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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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Books have to be read it is the only way of discovering what they contain.
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The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.
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The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.
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The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.
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The other damned saw what was happening and caught hold of it too. She was indignant and cried, “Let go-it’s my onion,” and as soon as she said, “my onion,” the stalk broke and she fell back into the flames.
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Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
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Though life is very glorious, it is difficult.
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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 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 makes a difference doesn’t it, whether we fully fence ourselves in, or whether we are fenced out by the barriers of others?
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How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
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Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.
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One has two duties – to be worried and not to be worried.
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The sort of poetry I seek only resides in objects Man can’t touch – like England ‘s grass network of lanes 100 years ago, but today he can destroy them and only Lord Farrer keeps him from doing it.
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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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One grows accustomed to being praised, or being blamed, or being advised, but it is unusual to be understood.
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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.
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Unless we remember we cannot understand.
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Don’t begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed.
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Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend.
E. M. FORSTER