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If only the sense of actuality can be lulled-and it sleeps for ever in most historians-there is no passion that cannot be gratified in the past.
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
Historians
Historian
Sleep
Passion
Sense
Lulled
Cannot
Gratified
Past
Sleeps
Ever
Actuality
More quotes by 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
Love felt and returned, love which our bodies exact and our hearts have transfigured, love which is the most real thing that we shall ever meet, reappeared now as the world's enemy, and she must stifle it.
E. M. Forster
Towns are after all excrescences, grey fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.
E. M. Forster
I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.
E. M. Forster
It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools.
E. M. Forster
When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.
E. M. Forster
They cared for no one, they were outside humanity, and death, had it come, would only have continued their pursuit of a retreating horizon.
E. M. Forster
The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.
E. M. Forster
Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.
E. M. Forster
Excuse my mistakes, realize my limitations. Life is not easy as we know it on the earth.
E. M. Forster
I do like Christmas on the whole.... In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But it is clumsier every year.
E. M. Forster
Books have to be read it is the only way of discovering what they contain.
E. M. Forster
Man can learn everything if he will but try.
E. M. Forster
Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.
E. M. Forster
Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.
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
Don't believe those lies about intellectual people. They're only written to soothe the majority.
E. M. Forster
How few writers can prostitute all their powers!
E. M. Forster
A novel must give a sense of permanence as well as a sense of life.
E. M. Forster
Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
E. M. Forster
