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Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.
E. M. Forster
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E. M. Forster
Age: 91 †
Born: 1879
Born: January 1
Died: 1970
Died: June 7
Biographer
Essayist
Librettist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
London
England
Edward Morgan Forster
E Forster
EM Forster
Entails
Ceases
Cease
Courage
Either
Literature
Life
More quotes by E. M. Forster
Lord I disbelieve - help thou my unbelief.
E. M. Forster
But I have seen my obstacles: trivialities, learning and poetry. This last needs explaining: the old artist's readiness to dissolve characters into a haze. Characters cannot come alive and fight and guide the world unless the novelist wants them to remain characters.
E. M. Forster
I am actually what my age and my upbringing have made me - a bourgeois who adheres to the British constitution, adheres to it rather than supports it, and the fact that this isn't dignified doesn't worry me.
E. M. Forster
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.
E. M. Forster
A mirror does not develop because an historical pageant passes in front of it. It only develops when it gets a fresh coat of quicksilver in other words, when it acquires new sensitiveness and the novel's success lies in its own sensitiveness, not in the success of its subject matter.
E. M. Forster
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
E. M. Forster
The novelist, unlike many of his colleagues, makes up a number of word-masses roughly describing himself (roughly: niceties shallcome later), gives them names and sex, assigns them plausible gestures, and causes them to speak by the use of inverted commas, and perhaps to behave consistently.
E. M. Forster
It was not that ladies were inferior to men it was that they were different. Their mission was to inspire others to achievement rather than to achieve themselves. Indirectly, by means of tact and a spotless name, a lady could accomplish much. But if she rushed into the fray herself she would be first censured, then despised, and finally ignored.
E. M. Forster
It isn't possible to love and to part.
E. M. Forster
It is easy to sympathize at a distance,' said an old gentleman with a beard. 'I value more the kind word that is spoken close to my ear.
E. M. Forster
She stopped and leant her elbows against the parapet of the embankment. He did likewise. There is at times a magic in identity of position it is one of the things that have suggested to us eternal comradeship.
E. M. Forster
In the creative state a man is taken out of himself.
E. M. Forster
One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.
E. M. Forster
As her time in Florence drew to a close she was only at ease amongst those to whom she felt indifferent.
E. M. Forster
Pathos, piety, courage, they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.
E. M. Forster
The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.
E. M. Forster
Ideas are fatal to caste.
E. M. Forster
If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
E. M. Forster
God is not Love in the East. He is Power, although Mercy may temper it.
E. M. Forster
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.
E. M. Forster