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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
Passion
Sense
Lulled
Cannot
Gratified
Past
Sleeps
Ever
Actuality
Historians
Historian
Sleep
More quotes by E. M. Forster
Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it.
E. M. Forster
Do not be proud of your inconsistency. It is a pity, it is a pity that we should be equipped like this. It is a pity that Man cannot be at the same time impressive and truthful.
E. M. Forster
They had nothing in common but the English language.
E. M. Forster
My law-givers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul.
E. M. Forster
Ulysses ... is a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud, an inverted Victorianism, an attempt to make crossness and dirt succeed where sweetness and light failed, a simplification of the human character in the interests of Hell.
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
. . . life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t'other from which . . .
E. M. Forster
I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.
E. M. Forster
It comes to this then: there always have been people like me and always will be, and generally they have been persecuted.
E. M. Forster
Reverence is fatal to literature.
E. M. Forster
We may divide characters into flat and round.
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
It was not that ladies were inferior to men it was that they were different. Their mission was to inspire others to achievement rather than to achieve themselves. Indirectly, by means of tact and a spotless name, a lady could accomplish much. But if she rushed into the fray herself she would be first censured, then despised, and finally ignored.
E. M. Forster
All invitations must proceed from heaven perhaps perhaps it is futile for men to initiate their own unity, they do but widen the gulfs between them by the attempt.
E. M. Forster
A novel must give a sense of permanence as well as a sense of life.
E. M. Forster
Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties. You will have noticed in daily life that when people are inquisitive they nearly always have bad memories and are usually stupid at bottom.
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
Towns are after all excrescences, grey fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.
E. M. Forster
Intuition attracts those who wish to be spiritual without any bother, because it promises a heaven where the intuitions of others can be ignored.
E. M. Forster
You want to love everyone equally, and that's worse than impossible--it's wrong.
E. M. Forster
