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Pathos, piety, courage, they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.
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
Exists
Exist
Value
Courage
Values
Pathos
Everything
Filth
Nothing
Piety
Identical
More quotes by E. M. Forster
We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.
E. M. Forster
It is devilish difficult to criticise society & also create human beings.
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
Man has to pick up the use of his functions as he goes along- especially the function of Love.
E. M. Forster
The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.
E. M. Forster
Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.
E. M. Forster
The present flowed by them like a stream. The tree rustled. It had made music before they were born, and would continue after their deaths, but its song was of the moment. The moment had passed. The tree rustled again. Their senses were sharpened, and they seemed to apprehend life. Life passed. The tree rustled again.
E. M. Forster
It is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.
E. M. Forster
England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.
E. M. Forster
Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.
E. M. Forster
The advance of regret can be so gradual that it is impossible to say yesterday I was happy, today I am not.
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
Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.
E. M. Forster
For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better.
E. M. Forster
As her time in Florence drew to a close she was only at ease amongst those to whom she felt indifferent.
E. M. Forster
For you cannot have gentility without paying for it.
E. M. Forster
There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.
E. M. Forster
We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
E. M. Forster
All men are equal — all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas.
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
