“It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from A Room with a View
“We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes, 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 from A Room with a View
“When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from A Room with a View
“Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from A Room with a View
“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 than 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, quote from A Room with a View
“Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from A Room with a View
“Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from A Room with a View
“It is fate that I am here,' George persisted, 'but you can call it Italy if it makes you less unhappy.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from A Room with a View
“Life' wrote a friend of mine, 'is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from A Room with a View
“It is so difficult - at least, I find it difficult - to understand people who speak the truth.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from A Room with a View
“By the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes--a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from A Room with a View
“I taught him, 'he quavered, "to trust in love. I said:'when love comes, that is reality.' I said: 'Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from A Room with a View
“She stopped and leant her elbows against the parapet of the embankment. He did likewise. There is at times a magic in identity of position; it is one of the things that have suggested to us eternal comradeship.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from A Room with a View
“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 from A Room with a View
“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, quote from A Room with a View
“... there are shadows because there are hills.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from A Room with a View
“Passion should believe itself irresistible. It should forget civility and consideration and all the other curses of a refined nature. Above all, it should never ask for leave where there is a right of way.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from A Room with a View
“Take an old man's word; there's nothing worse than a muddle in all the world. It is easy to face Death and Fate, and the things that sound so dreadful. It is on my muddles that I look back with horror - on the things that I might have avoided. We can help one another but little. I used to think I could teach young people the whole of life, but I know better now, and all my teaching of George has come down to this: beware of muddle.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from A Room with a View
“Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?”
― E.M. Forster, quote from A Room with a View
“She only felt that the candle would burn better, the packing go easier, the world be happier, if she could give and receive some human love.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from A Room with a View
“The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from A Room with a View
“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, quote from A Room with a View
“No, he is not tactful, yet have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet, at the same time, beautiful?”
― E.M. Forster, quote from A Room with a View
“One doesn't come to Italy for niceness," was the retort; "one comes for life. Buon giorno! Buon giorno!”
― E.M. Forster, quote from A Room with a View
“...though nothing is damaged, everything is changed.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from A Room with a View
“There is much that is immortal in this medieval lady. The dragons have gone, and so have the knights, but still she lingers in our midst. She reigned in many an early Victorian castle, and was Queen of much early Victorian song. It is sweet to protect her in the intervals of business, sweet to pay her honour when she has cooked our dinner well. But alas! the creature grows degenerate. In her heart also there are springing up strange desires. She too is enamoured of heavy winds, and vast panoramas, and green expanses of the sea. She has marked the kingdom of this world, how full it is of wealth, and beauty, and war--a radiant crust, built around the central fires, spinning towards the receding heavens. Men, declaring that she inspires them to it, move joyfully over the surface, having the most delightful meetings with other men, happy, not because they are masculine, but because they are alive. Before the show breaks up she would like to drop the august title of the Eternal Woman, and go there as her transitory self.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from A Room with a View
“Of course he despised the world as a whole; every thoughtful man should; it is almost a test of refinement.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from A Room with a View
“Don't go fighting against the Spring.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from A Room with a View
“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, quote from A Room with a View
“It was pleasant to wake up in Florence, to open the eyes upon a bright bare room, with a floor of red tiles which look clean though they are not; with a painted ceiling whereon pink griffins and blue amorini sport in a forest of yellow violins and bassoons. It was pleasant, too, to fling wide the windows, pinching the fingers in unfamiliar fastenings, to lean out into sunshine with beautiful hills and trees and marble churches opposite, and, close below, Arno, gurgling against the embankment of the road.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from A Room with a View
E.M. Forster
Born place: in Marylebone, London, England, The United Kingdom
Born date January 1, 1879
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“This is how bullies are made. I’d just purposely made him feel unloved and unwanted. I’d told him he was alone. Even with everything he’d pulled on me, I’d never felt abandoned or isolated. There was always someone that loved me, someone I could count on.”
― Penelope Douglas, quote from Bully
“You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.”
― Hilary Mantel, quote from Wolf Hall
“Memory runs along deep, fixed channels in the brain, like electricity along its conduits; only a cataclysm can make the electrons rear up in shock and slide over into another channel. The human mind seems doomed to believe, as simply as a rooster believes, that where we are now is the only possibility”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from Animal Dreams
“The human mind is only capable of absorbing a few things at a time. We see what is taking place in front of us in the here and now, and cannot envisage simultaneously a succession of processes, no matter how integrated and complementary. Our faculties of perception are consequently limited even as regards fairly simple phenomena. The fate of a single man can be rich with significance, that of a few hundred less so, but the history of thousands and millions of men does not mean anything at all, in any adequate sense of the word. The symmetriad is a million—a billion, rather—raised to the power of N: it is incomprehensible. We pass through vast halls, each with a capacity of ten Kronecker units, and creep like so many ants clinging to the folds of breathing vaults and craning to watch the flight of soaring girders, opalescent in the glare of searchlights, and elastic domes which criss-cross and balance each other unerringly, the perfection of a moment, since everything here passes and fades. The essence of this architecture is movement synchronized towards a precise objective. We observe a fraction of the process, like hearing the vibration of a single string in an orchestra of supergiants. We know, but cannot grasp, that above and below, beyond the limits of perception or imagination, thousands and millions of simultaneous transformations are at work, interlinked like a musical score by mathematical counterpoint. It has been described as a symphony in geometry, but we lack the ears to hear it.”
― Stanisław Lem, quote from Solaris
“Nina glanced from Inej to Kaz and saw they both wore the same expression. Nina knew that look. It came after the shipwreck, when the tide moved against you and the sky had gone dark. It was the first sight of land, the hope of shelter and even salvation that might await you on a distant shore.”
― Leigh Bardugo, quote from Crooked Kingdom
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Big Little LiesBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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