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Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence.
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
Book
Describe
Nothing
Dull
Would
Existence
Life
Books
Literature
Talk
Justifying
Interesting
Exaggerate
Hope
Obliged
More quotes by E. M. Forster
You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.
E. M. Forster
Chess is a forcing house where the fruits of character can ripen more fully than in life
E. M. Forster
All that is observable in a man-that is to say his actions and such of his spiritual existence as can be deduced from his actions-falls into the domain of history.
E. M. Forster
While her lips talked culture, her heart was planning to invite him to tea
E. M. Forster
Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly they are still entangled with the desire for ownership.
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
I hated the idleness, the stupidity, the respectability, the petty unselfishness.
E. M. Forster
Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.
E. M. Forster
The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.
E. M. Forster
He doesn't want you to be real, and to think and to live. He doesn't love you. But I love you. I want you to have your own thoughts and ideas and feelings, even when I hold you in my arms.
E. M. Forster
The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected.
E. M. Forster
What the world most needs today are negative virtues - not minding people, not being huffy, touchy, irritable or revengeful.
E. M. Forster
We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.
E. M. Forster
Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something vulgarity, concealing something.
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
One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves.
E. M. Forster
England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature--for the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still, for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk.
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
He educated Maurice, or rather his spirit educated Maurice's spirit, for they themselves became equal. Neither thought Am I led am I leading? Love had caught him out of triviality and Maurice out of bewilderment in order that two imperfect souls might touch perfection.
E. M. Forster
