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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| eeb8a3e | Too late... everything's always too late. | maurice regret | E.M. Forster | |
| 32d1177 | She was parting from these Wilcoxes for the second time. Paul and his mother, ripple and great wave, had flowed into her life and ebbed out of it forever. The ripple had left no traces behind: the wave had strewn at her feet fragments torn from the unknown. A curious seeker, she stood for a while at the verge of the sea that tells so little, but tells a little, and watched the outgoing of this last tremendous tide. | E.M. Forster | ||
| caa5d08 | We reach in desperation beyond the fog, beyond the very stars, the voids of the universe are ransacked to justify the monster, and stamped with a human face. London is religions opportunity--not the decorous religion of theologians, but an anthropomorphic, crude. Yes, the continuous flow would be tolerable if a man of our own sort--not anyone pompous or tearful--were caring for us up in the sky. | life religion truth | E.M. Forster | |
| 25261df | The human mind is not a dignified organ, and I do not see how we can exercise it sincerely except through eclecticism. And the only advice I would offer my fellow eclectics is: "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." | literature-writing novel truth writing | E.M. Forster | |
| 15457e1 | George had turned at the sound of her arrival. For a moment he contemplated her, as one who had fallen out of heaven. He saw radiant joy on her face, he saw the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves. The bushes above them closed. He stepped quickly forward and kissed her. | E. M. Forster | ||
| 1ff2f8a | But that some sonatas of Beethoven are written tragic no one can gainsay; yet they can triumph or despair as the player decides, and Lucy had decided that they should triumph. | E.M. Forster | ||
| 36f0e25 | But in public who shall express the unseen adequately? It is private life that holds out the mirror to infinity; personal intercourse, and that alone, that ever hints at a personality beyond our daily vision. | E.M. Forster | ||
| 8fafb29 | They had nothing in common but the English language, and tried by its help to express what neither of them understood. | language | E.M. Forster | |
| a629d33 | Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science. | comfort science sympathy | E.M. Forster | |
| b5251af | Oh, poor, poor fellow!' said Mrs. Elliot with a remorse that was sincere, though her congratulations would not have been. | sympathy | E. M. Forster | |
| 08e520d | 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 | ||
| 34eb332 | It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile . . . That is not imagination. No, it kills it. . . . Your universities? Oh, yes, you have learned men who collect . . . facts, and facts, and empires of facts. But which of them will rekindle the light within? | E.M. Forster | ||
| a3f58b4 | England was alive, throbbing through all her estuaries, crying for joy through the mouths of all her gulls, and the north wind, with contrary motion, blew stronger against her rising seas. What did it mean? For what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her sinuous coast? Does she belong to those who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who have added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her,.. | E.M. Forster | ||
| 55826e5 | The conversation had become unreal since Christianity had entered it. Ronny approved of religion as long as it endorsed the National Anthem, but he objected when it attempted to influence his life. | E.M. Forster | ||
| 8b62a69 | It so happened that Lucy, who found daily life rather chaotic, entered a more solid world when she opened the piano. She was then no longer either deferential or patronizing; no longer either a rebel or a slave. 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 l.. | E.M. Forster | ||
| 3b8e8a7 | from the middle-middle classes, whose highest desire seemed shelter - continuous shelter - not a lair in the darkness to be reached against fear, but shelter everywhere and always, until the existence of earth and sky is forgotten, shelter from poverty and disease and violence and impoliteness; and consequently from joy; God slipped this retribution in. | E.M. Forster | ||
| 6d71de7 | Ladies sheltering behind men, men sheltering behind servants - the whole system's wrong, and she must challenge it. | e-m-forster howards-end novel | E.M. Forster | |
| 1d4f614 | If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people -- a very few people, but a few novelists are among them -- are trying to do this. Every institution and vested interest is against such a search: organized religion, the State, the family in its economic aspect, have nothing to gain, and it is only when outward prohibitions weaken that it can proceed: history condition.. | imagination literature movement novel | E.M. Forster | |
| ba4df34 | No, mother; no. She was really keen on Italy. This travel is quite a crisis for her." He found the situation full of whimsical romance: there was something half attractive, half repellent in the thought of this vulgar woman journeying to places he loved and revered. Why should she not be transfigured? The same had happened to the Goths." | italy | E.M. Forster | |
| e4432d2 | 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. | future leviathan man nature science-fiction | E.M. Forster | |
| cf6caa8 | and someone he scarcely knew moved towards him and knelt beside him and whispered, 'Sir, was you calling out for me? ... Sir, I know ... I know,' and touched him. | love | E.M. Forster | |
| de3efad | They too entered the world of dreams- that world in which a third of each man's life is spent, and which is thought by some pessimists to be a premonition of eternity. | E.M. Forster | ||
| 067004f | And Aziz in an awful rage danced this way and that, not knowing what to do, and cried: "Down with the English anyhow. That's certain. Clear out, you fellows, double quick, I say. We may hate one another, but we hate you most. If I don't make you go, Ahmed will, Karim will, if it's flfty-flve hundred years we shall get rid of you, yes, we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea, and then "--he rode against him furiously-- "and then.. | colonialism india | E.M. Forster | |
| 40e3b70 | In Rome one had simply to sit still and feel. | E.M. Forster | ||
| d452dcc | Italian in the mouth of Italians is a deep-voiced stream, with unexpected cataracts and boulders to preserve it from monotony. In Mr. Eager's mouth it resembled nothing so much as an acid whistling fountain which played ever higher and higher, and quicker and quicker, and more and more shrilly, till abruptly it was turned off with a click. | E.M. Forster | ||
| 2fbd9c6 | So abased, so monotonous is everything that meets the eye, that when the Ganges comes down it might be expected to wash the excrescence back into the soil. Houses do fall, people are drowned and left rotting, but the general outline of the town persists, welling here, shrinking there, like some low but indestructible form of life. | E.M. Forster | ||
| e2fea09 | They have yielded to the only enemy that matters - the enemy within. | E.M. Forster | ||
| 7696067 | He lived on, miserable and misunderstood, as before, and increasingly lonely. One cannot write those words too often: Maurice's loneliness: it increased. | E.M. Forster | ||
| 3b1d59f | There are freaky talking mannequins in the Salem Witch Museum that recite the Lord's Prayer and while they do resemble shrunken apples they nevertheless help the visitor understand how hard it must have been for the condemned to say the line about forgiving those who trespass against us. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| ae0680e | Devoted to principles of liberty, equality, and religious tolerance -- which, dear internet, is not necessarily the same thing as satanism -- Masonic lodge became the de facto clubhouses of the Age of Reason. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 7bebf0a | I am drawn to Tom Sawyer Island because a tribute to Mark Twain would not be out of place in a theme park of my own design. Should Vowell World ever get enough investors, I'm going to stick my Tom Sawyer Island in Love and Death in the American Novel Land right between the Jay Gatsby Swimming Pool and Tom Joad's Dust Bowl Lanes, a Depression-themed bowling alley renting artfully worn-out shoes. | as-i-lay-dying great-gatsby humor mark-twain tom-sawyer | Sarah Vowell | |
| b897bfd | That Steuben, who needed a translator, what with his English vocabulary consisting almost entirely of swear words, ended up being the perfect hire to upgrade the Continental Army should rattle every search committee, small-business owner, casting director, college admissions officer, headhunter, and voter. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| fb04e11 | It's such a hopeful, almost utopian word, that word "phase." As if any minute, "we" would suffer some sort of Joad overload, come to "our" senses, and for heaven's sake, do something about our godforsaken shoes. But the book phase never ended. The book phase would bloom and grow into a whole series of seasonal affiliations including our communist phase, our beatnik phase, our vegetarian phase, and the three-year period known as Please Don't.. | phase | Sarah Vowell | |
| 9331314 | At a Clinton press conference, I'm given the luxury of daydreaming, of being comfortable enough that he could find Peru on a map, say, that I don't have to hang on his every word, praying he won't fuck up. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 741bfaa | Not that there wasn't still plenty of subduing to do here in North America. "Even within our own limits, the savage still lights his death fires, to appease the wrath of an idol," he points out. What's worse, to the "north, there is an immense region of palpable darkness." (Hi, Canada!)" | Sarah Vowell | ||
| d2fa4be | Since the lunchroom does no significant harm to the caverns' ecology, I'd like to believe that this is one of those lucky places where we don't have to choose between doing the right thing and enjoying a goof. I look up at the ceiling of the lunchroom, which is, of course, the ceiling of the cave. It looks so lunar I can't help but think of a certain astronaut. In 1971, Apollo 14's Alan Shepard hit golf balls on the moon. Gearing up to face.. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| f504992 | If two of the most distinguished, dedicated, and thoughtful public servants in the history of this republic could not find a way to agree to disagree, how can we expect the current crop of congressional blockheads to get along? | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 288c88b | While technically Maryland remained in the Union during the Civil War, it was the border state, a schizophrenic no-man's-land with the North at its door and the South in its heart. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 7a0f372 | Whether or not the United States has saved the world, it did save France a time or two. When the American Expeditionary Forces commanded by General John J. Pershing came to the aid of France during World War I, they marched into Paris on July 4, 1917, heading straight for Picpus Cemetery. Colonel Charles E. Stanton, whose uncle had been Abraham Lincoln's secretary of war, addressed the French people while standing before Lafayette's tomb. ".. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 668380a | In The Bloudy Tenent, Williams points out that Constantine "did more to hurt Christ Jesus than the raging fury of the most bloody Neroes." at least under the Christian persecutor Nero, who was rumored to have had the Apostle Paul beheaded and Saint Peter crucified upside down, Christianity was a pure (if hazardous) way of life. But when Constantine himself converted to Christianity, that's when the Church was corrupted and perverted by the .. | histories-mysteries | Sarah Vowell | |
| 8afb8ec | I suspect that the day a person gives up on the Geneva Convention is the day a person gives up on the human race. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| b262d34 | I like that the Mall serves as our national Tuppaware, reliable and empty, waiting to be filled with potluck whatever. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 0d9c061 | After Hiram Bingham built the first church on Oahu the student recalls, "When it was completed some of the natives said among themselves, 'That house of worship built by the haoles is a place in which they will pray us all to death. It is meant to kill us." | god humor religion | Sarah Vowell | |
| 9b711fa | Why is America the last best hope of Earth? What if it's Liechtenstein? Or, worse, Canada? | Sarah Vowell |