“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 from The Machine Stops
“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 from The Machine Stops
“Vashti was seized with the terrors of direct experience. She shrank back into the room, and the wall closed up again.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from The Machine Stops
“And of course she had studied the civilization that had immediately preceded her own - the civilization that had mistaken the functions of the system, and had used it for bringing people to things, instead of for bringing things to people. Those funny old days, when men went for change of air instead of changing the air in their rooms!”
― E.M. Forster, quote from The Machine Stops
“Man is the measure. That was my first lesson. Man's feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from The Machine Stops
“Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element - direct observation. Do not learn anything about this subject of mine - the French Revolution. Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho-Yung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought Lafcadio Hearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from The Machine Stops
“Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven. Century after century had he toiled, and here was his reward. Truly the garment had seemed heavenly at first, shot with colours of culture, sewn with the threads of self-denial. And heavenly it had been so long as man could shed it at will and live by the essence that is his soul, and the essence, equally divine, that is his body.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from The Machine Stops
“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 from The Machine Stops
“Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralyzed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops - but not on our lies. The Machine proceeds - but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from The Machine Stops
“Man's feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from The Machine Stops
“Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives in the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It was robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralyzed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops - but not on our lies. The Machine proceeds - but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from The Machine Stops
“But there came a day when, without the slightest warning, without any previous hint of feebleness, the entire communication-system broke down, all over the world, and the world, as they understood it, ended. Vashti”
― E.M. Forster, quote from The Machine Stops
“In the dawn of the world our weakly must be exposed on Mount Taygetus, in its twilight our strong will suffer euthanasia, that the Machine may progress, that the Machine may progress, that the Machine may progress eternally.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from The Machine Stops
“لقد صنعنا الآلة لكي تنفذ إرادتنا، لكننا لا نملك أن ندفعها لتنفيذها الآن.. والآن تجبرنا على عبادتها.. إن الآلة تتطور و لكن ليس وفق مخططاتنا..تواصل مسيرها لكن ليس نحو هدفنا.. نحن موجودون فقط ككريات دم تسري في شرايينها، وإذا كانت قادرة على العمل بدوننا، فسوف تتركنا نموت.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from The Machine Stops
“Then she generated the light, and the sight of her room, flooded with radiance and studded with electric buttons, revived her. There were buttons and switches everywhere – buttons to call for food for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature. And there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from The Machine Stops
E.M. Forster
Born place: in Marylebone, London, England, The United Kingdom
Born date January 1, 1879
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“He looked like some primitive golden god hunted to death.”
― Laurell K. Hamilton, quote from Danse Macabre
“When the subject of kids first came up years ago, I'd joked that the only thing I could imagine worse than me as a mother was Clay as a father. I couldn't have been more wrong. Clay was an amazing parents. The guy who couldn't spare a few minutes to hear a mutt's side of the story could listen to his kids talk all day. The guy who couldn't sit still through a brief council meeting could spend hours building Lego castles with his kids. The guy who solved problems with his fists never even raised his voice to his children. And if sometimes Clay was a little too indulgent, a little too slow to discipline, preferring to leave that to me, I was okay with it. He supported and enforced my decisions and we presented a unified front to our children, and that was all that mattered.”
― Kelley Armstrong, quote from Frostbitten
“We think of happiness as something we can take. But usually it comes from being content with what we have, and accepting ourselves.”
― Cynthia Hand, quote from Boundless
“I was sitting there, as I said, and had been for several watches, when I came to me that I was reading no longer. For some time I was hard put to say what I had been doing. When I tried, I could only think of certain odors and textures and colors that seemed to have no connection with anything discussed in the volume I held. At last I realized that instead of reading it, I had been observing it as a physical object. The red I recalled came from the ribbon sewn to the headband so that I might mark my place. The texture that tickled my fingers still was that of the paper in which the book was printed. The smell in my nostrils was old leather, still wearing the traces of birch oil. It was only then, when I saw the books themselves, when I began to understand their care.”
His grip on my shoulder tightened. “We have books here bound in the hides of echidnes, krakens, and beasts so long extinct that those whose studies they are, are for the most part of the opinion that no trace of them survives unfossilized. We have books bound wholly in metals of unknown alloy, and books whose bindings are covered with the thickest gems. We have books cased in perfumed woods shipped across the inconceivable gulf between creations—books doubly precious because no one on Urth can read them.”
“We have books whose papers are matted of plants from which spring curious alkaloids, so that the reader, in turning their pages, is taken unaware by bizarre fantasies and chimeric dreams. Books whose pages are not paper at all, but delicate wafers of white jade, ivory, and shell; books too who leaves are the desiccated leaves of unknown plants. Books we have also that are not books at all to the eye: scrolls and tablets and recordings on a hundred different substances. There is a cube of crystal here—though I can no longer tell you where—no larger than the ball of your thumb that contains more books than the library itself does. Though a harlot might dangle it from one ear for an ornament, there are not volumes enough in the world to counterweight the other.”
― Gene Wolfe, quote from The Shadow of the Torturer
“She waited, unwilling to meet his eyes, hoping he would go on. When he didn't, the silence stretched between them like invisible cobwebs. In the dimmest part of her, she realized she might have wishes, too, elusive wishes that belonged more to a girl in a garden than they did to a captive.”
― Caragh M. O'Brien, quote from Birthmarked
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