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.
E. M. FORSTERIt 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.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.
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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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You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.
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We move between two darknesses.
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One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.
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School 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.
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My conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it.
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There are periods in the most thrilling day during which nothing happens, and though we continue to exclaim, “I do enjoy myself”, or , “I am horrified,” we are insincere.
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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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Though life is very glorious, it is difficult.
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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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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.
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Books have to be read it is the only way of discovering what they contain.
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For it is a serious thing to have been watched. We all radiate something curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone.
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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.
E. M. FORSTER






