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Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.
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
Infectious
Paganism
Piety
Literature
More quotes by E. M. Forster
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
She must be assured that it is not a criminal offense to love at first sight.
E. M. Forster
This desire to govern a woman -- it lies very deep, and men and women must fight it together.... But I do love you surely in a better way then he does. He thought. Yes -- really in a better way. I want you to have your own thoughts even when I hold you in my arms.
E. M. Forster
The Germans are called brutal, the Spanish cruel, the Americans superficial, and so on but we are perfide Albion, the island of hypocrites, the people who have built up an Empire with a Bible in one hand, a pistol in the other, and financial concessions in both pockets. Is the charge true? I think it is.
E. M. Forster
Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and of the recipient.
E. M. Forster
Self-pity? I see no moral objections to it, the smell drives people away, but that's a practical objection, and occasionally an advantage.
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
You talk as if a god had made the Machine, cried the other. I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but not everything.
E. M. Forster
It isn't possible to love and to part.
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
Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown
E. M. Forster
When love flies it is remembered not as love but as something else. Blessed are the uneducated, who forget it entirely, and are never conscious of folly or pruriency in the past, of long aimless conversations.
E. M. Forster
Pathos, piety, courage, they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.
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
Man can learn everything if he will but try.
E. M. Forster
I don't think literature will be purged until its philosophic pretentiousness is extruded, and I shant live to see that purge, nor perhaps when it has happened will anything survive.
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
I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.
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
I am actually what my age and my upbringing have made me - a bourgeois who adheres to the British constitution, adheres to it rather than supports it, and the fact that this isn't dignified doesn't worry me.
E. M. Forster
