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At times our need for a sympathetic gesture is so great that we care not what exactly it signifies or how much we may have to pay for it afterwards.
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
Great
Afterwards
Needs
Gestures
Much
Exactly
Pay
Times
Care
Signifies
May
Gesture
Need
Sympathetic
More quotes by E. M. Forster
The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.
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
Some reviews give pain. This is regrettable, but no author has the right to whine. He was not obliged to be an author. He invited publicity, and he must take the publicity that comes along.
E. M. Forster
When we were only acquaintances, you let me be myself, but now you're always protecting me... I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. Can't I be trusted to face the truth but I must get it second-hand through you? A woman's place!
E. M. Forster
Solidity, caution, integrity, efficiency. Lack of imagination, hypocrisy. These qualities characterize the middle classes in everycountry, but in England they are national characteristics.
E. M. Forster
Ideas are fatal to caste.
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
The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.
E. M. Forster
Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.
E. M. Forster
Romance only dies with life. No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of us. But there is a spurious sentiment which cannot resist the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque. A touch will loosen it, and the sooner it goes from us the better.
E. M. Forster
But after all, what have we to do with taverns? Real menace belongs to the drawing-room.
E. M. Forster
The present flowed by them like a stream. The tree rustled. It had made music before they were born, and would continue after their deaths, but its song was of the moment. The moment had passed. The tree rustled again. Their senses were sharpened, and they seemed to apprehend life. Life passed. The tree rustled again.
E. M. Forster
Don't believe those lies about intellectual people. They're only written to soothe the majority.
E. M. Forster
All men are equal — all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas.
E. M. Forster
Chess is a forcing house where the fruits of character can ripen more fully than in life
E. M. Forster
The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal. Both assumptions are false: both of them must be accepted as true if we are to go on eating and working and loving, and are to keep open a few breathing holes for the human spirit.
E. M. Forster
Happiness in the ordinary sense is not what one needs in life, though one is right to aim at it. The true satisfaction is to come through, and see those whom one lives come through.
E. M. Forster
Human beings have their great chance in the novel.
E. M. Forster
You want to love everyone equally, and that's worse than impossible--it's wrong.
E. M. Forster
He had known so much about her once -what she thought, how she felt, the reasons for her actions. And now he only knew that he loved her, and all the other knowledge seemed passing from him just as he needed it most.
E. M. Forster
