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.
E. M. FORSTERI 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.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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Outside the arch, always there seemed another arch. And beyond the remotest echo, a silence.
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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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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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Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?
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Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.
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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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Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. I do not believe in it, for its own sake, at all… My lawgivers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul.
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Think before you speak is criticism’s motto; speak before you think, creation’s.
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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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We 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.
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Do not be proud of your inconsistency. It is a pity, it is a pity that we should be equipped like this. It is a pity that Man cannot be at the same time impressive and truthful.
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When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.
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We move between two darknesses.
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What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?
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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.
E. M. FORSTER