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By the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes--a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.
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
Transitory
Everlasting
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Sides
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More quotes by E. M. Forster
She must be assured that it is not a criminal offense to love at first sight.
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
I do not believe in Belief.
E. M. Forster
It is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.
E. M. Forster
Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.
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
We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.
E. M. Forster
I don't know what to think until I see what I've said.
E. M. Forster
He was obliged however to throw over Christianity. Those who base their conduct upon what they are rather than upon what they ought to be, always must throw it over in the end . . . .
E. M. Forster
England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.
E. M. Forster
Hope, politeness, the blowing of a nose, the squeak of a boot, all produce boum.
E. M. Forster
The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken.
E. M. Forster
There has been, is, and always will be every conceivable type of person.
E. M. Forster
If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting--both for us and for her.
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
This element of surprise or mystery the detective element as it is sometimes rather emptily called is of great importance in a plot.
E. M. Forster
[...] it is right to be kind and even sacrifice ourselves to people who need kindness and lie in our way - otherwise, besides failing to help them, we run into the aridity of self-development. To seek for recipients of one's goodness, to play the Potted Jesus leads to the contray the Christian danger.
E. M. Forster
Pathos, piety, courage, they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.
E. M. Forster
She only felt that the candle would burn better, the packing go easier, the world be happier, if she could give and receive some human love.
E. M. Forster
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.
E. M. Forster
