Give, do not lend; after death who will thank you?
E. M. FORSTERWhen 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.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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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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How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
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What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
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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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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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There is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.
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I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I’d like to be.
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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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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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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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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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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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The emotions may be endless. The more we express them, the more we may have to express.
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When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.
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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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I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.
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It’s not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts.
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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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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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My conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it.
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The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.
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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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The historian records, but the novelist creates.
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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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Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
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Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.
E. M. FORSTER