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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
Historian
Sleep
Passion
Sense
Lulled
Cannot
Gratified
Past
Sleeps
Ever
Actuality
Historians
More quotes by E. M. Forster
Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.
E. M. Forster
A critic has no right to the narrowness which is the frequent prerogative of the creative artist.
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
Ah, but you see, I didn't want to be fair.
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
Their quarrel was no more surprising than are most quarrels — inevitable at the time, incredible afterwards.
E. M. Forster
It is devilish difficult to criticise society & also create human beings.
E. M. Forster
Tolerance is just a makeshift, suitable for an overcrowded and overheated planet. It carries on when love gives out, and love generally gives out as soon as we move away from our home and our friends.
E. M. Forster
Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.
E. M. Forster
The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.
E. M. Forster
If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.
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
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
As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take the examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one be a penny the stupider.
E. M. Forster
Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.
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
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
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
How few writers can prostitute all their powers!
E. M. Forster
