The collection / 200 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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200 results · Page 4 of 9Play this collection ▷

01c. 1924 AD

No; look out for the part where you think you have done with the goblins and they come back,' breathed Helen, as the music started with a goblin walking quietly over the universe, from end to end.

E.M. Forster / quote

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02c. 1924 AD

While her lips talked culture, her heart was planning to invite him to tea

E.M. Forster / quote

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03c. 1924 AD

We move between two darknesses.

E.M. Forster / quote

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04c. 1924 AD

Either life entails courage or it ceases to be life.

E.M. Forster / quote

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05c. 1924 AD

All a child's life depends on the ideal it has of its parents. Destroy that and everything goes - morals, behavior, everything. Absolute trust in someone else is the essence of education.

E.M. Forster / quote

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06c. 1924 AD

I'd far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children.

E.M. Forster / quote

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07c. 1924 AD

For a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and—by some sad, strange irony—it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy.

E.M. Forster / quote

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08c. 1924 AD

I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows.

E.M. Forster / quote

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09c. 1924 AD

When we were only acquaintances, you let me be myself, but now you're always protecting me... I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. Can't I be trusted to face the truth but I must get it second-hand through you? A woman's place!

E.M. Forster / quote

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10c. 1924 AD

People turned out to be alive. Hitherto he had supposed that they were what he pretended to be - flat pieces of cardboard stamped with a conventional design… there came by no process of reason a conviction that they were human beings with feelings akin to his own.

E.M. Forster / quote

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11c. 1924 AD

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 / quote

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12c. 1924 AD

As for her hair, or rather hairs, they are too complicated to describe, but one system went down her back, lying in a thick pad there, while another, created for a lighter destiny, rippled around her forehead.

E.M. Forster / quote

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13c. 1924 AD

The novelist defines the story with the following example: If you are told that the king died and then the queen died, that is a sequence of events. If you were told that the king died and then the queen died of grief, that is a story that he was interested.

E.M. Forster / quote

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14c. 1924 AD

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 / quote

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15c. 1924 AD

Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul.

E.M. Forster / quote

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16c. 1924 AD

Night and day, wind and storm, tide and earthquake, impeded man no longer. He had harnessed Leviathan. All the old literature, with its praise of Nature, and its fear of Nature, rang false as the prattle of a child.

E.M. Forster / quote

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17c. 1924 AD

How can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in exile. The important towns they build are only retreats, their quarrels the malaise of men who cannot find their way home. India knows of their trouble. She knows of the whole world's trouble, to its uttermost depth. She calls "Come" through her hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august. But come to what? She has never defined. She is not a promise, only an appeal.

E.M. Forster / quote

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18c. 1924 AD

Human beings have their great chance in the novel.

E.M. Forster / quote

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19c. 1924 AD

Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.

E.M. Forster / quote

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20c. 1924 AD

There is only a certain amount of kindness in the world…just as there is a certain amount of light. We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things…Choose a place where you won’t do very much harm and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.

E.M. Forster / quote

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21c. 1924 AD

It is the starved imagination, not the well-nourished, that is afraid.

E.M. Forster / quote

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22c. 1924 AD

He will work off his crudities in time. I rather mistrust young men who slip into life gracefully.

E.M. Forster / quote

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23c. 1924 AD

Men were not gods after all, but as human and as clumsy as girls.

E.M. Forster / quote

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24c. 1924 AD

The issues Miss Quested had raised were so much more important than she was herself that people inevitably forgot her.

E.M. Forster / quote

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