The historian records, but the novelist creates.
E. M. FORSTEROne always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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There are moments when the inner life actually ‘pays,’ when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use.
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It’s not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts.
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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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Think before you speak is criticism’s motto; speak before you think, creation’s.
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Don’t be mysterious; there isn’t the time.
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I won’t be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult.
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Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown
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It was pleasant to wake up in Florence, to open the eyes upon a bright bare room, with a floor of red tiles which look clean though they are not; with a painted ceiling whereon pink griffins and blue amorini sport in a forest of yellow violins and bassoons.
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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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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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My temple stands not upon Mount Moriah but in the Elysian Field where even the immoral are admitted. My motto is ‘Lord, I disbelieve – help thou my unbelief.
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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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The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.
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But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.
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But it struck him that people are not really dead until they are felt to be dead. As long as there is some misunderstanding about them, they possess a sort of immortality.
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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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Though life is very glorious, it is difficult.
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The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world.
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You confuse what’s important with what’s impressive.
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Adventures do occur, but not punctually.
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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.
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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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Life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t’other from which . . .
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It isn’t possible to love and to part.
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There is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.
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Outside the arch, always there seemed another arch. And beyond the remotest echo, a silence.
E. M. FORSTER