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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| b30a23b | Anyone can find places, but the finding of people is a gift from God. | E.M. Forster | ||
| edfde0d | She disliked confidences, for they might lead to self-knowledge and to that king of terrors--Light. | E.M. Forster | ||
| a4d0a0b | Naked I came into the world, naked I shall go out of it! And a very good thing too, for it reminds me that I am naked under my shirt, whatever its colour. | E.M. Forster | ||
| af1ff28 | He was inaccurate because he was sensitive. | E.M. Forster | ||
| 59b99e0 | As is Man to the Universe, so was the mind of Mr. Wilcox to the minds of some men -- a concentrated light upon a tiny spot, a little Ten Minutes moving self-contained through its appointed years. No Pagan he, who lives for the Now, and may be wiser than all philosophers. He lived for the five minutes that have past, and the five to come; he had the business mind. | E.M. Forster | ||
| 9dd77c1 | By God, if you'd split on me to Mr Ducie, I'd have broken you. It might have cost me hundreds, but I've got them, and the police always back my sort against yours. You don't know. We'd have got you into quod, for blackmail, after which -- I'd have blown out my brains.' 'Killed yourself? Death?' 'I should have known by that time that I loved you. Too late . . . everything's always too late. | E.M. Forster | ||
| 7709c1f | Vagueness spurred him into knight errantry. | graciousness planning romanticism | E.M. Forster | |
| f363871 | Travel was a species of warfare. | insularity openness skepticism | E.M. Forster | |
| 1e78da1 | He was thinking of the irony of friendship--so strong it is, and so fragile. We fly together, like straws in an eddy, to part in the open stream. | friendship | E.M. Forster | |
| d1a0c97 | How indeed is it possible for one human being to be sorry for all the sadness that meets him on the face of the earth, for the pain that is endured not only by men, but by animals and plants, and perhaps by the stones? The soul is tired in a moment, and in fear of losing the little she does understand, she retreats to the permanent lines which habit or chance have dictated, and suffers there. | E.M. Forster | ||
| 5ff69c3 | The haughty nephew ... and an even haughtier wife, both convinced that Germany was appointed by God to govern the world. Aunt July would come the next day, convinced that Great Britain had been appointed to the same post by the same authority. Were both these loud-voiced parties right? On one occasion they had met, and Margaret ... had implored them to argue the subject out in her presence. Whereat they blushed and began to talk about the w.. | religion war | E.M. Forster | |
| 5513350 | London was beginning to illuminate herself against the night. Electric lights sizzled and jagged in the main thoroughfares, gas-lamps in the side streets glimmered a canary gold or green. The sky was a crimson battlefield of spring, but London was not afraid. Her smoke mitigated the splendour, and the clouds down Oxford Street were a delicately painted ceiling, which adorned while it did not distract. She has never known the clear-cut armie.. | colors description e-m-forster howards-end london nightfall romance | E.M. Forster | |
| 9216895 | You know I don't like to read, Yankee girl. Don't think anyone likes to read as much as you do. What you got under your arm this time?" "E. M. Forster." -- | Ruta Sepetys | ||
| 488deab | Indoors herself, partaking of tea with old Mrs Butterworth, she reflected that it is impossible to foretell the future with any degree of accuracy, that it is impossible to rehearse life. A fault in the scenery, a face in the audience, an irruption of the audience onto the stage, and all our carefully planned gestures mean nothing, or mean too much. | em-forster forster life | E.M. Forster | |
| 04c30ec | At my age one's seldom amazed," he said, smiling. "Marriage is too absurd in any case. It begins and continues for such very slight reasons. The social business props it up on one side, and the theological business on the other, but neither of them are marriage, are they? I've friends who can't remember why they married, no more can their wives. I suspect that it mostly happens haphazard, though afterwards various noble reasons are invented.. | E.M. Forster | ||
| 2be28f0 | 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 | ||
| 72f1e33 | Life is not about age, about the length of years we manage to eke out of it. It is about aging, about living into the values offered in every stage of life. As E. M. Forster wrote, "We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us." | Joan D. Chittister | ||
| b4522e0 | 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 -- but as he strolled about the courts at night and saw through the windows some men singing and others arguing and others at their books, there came by no process of reason a conviction that they were human beings with feelings akin to his own. He had never lived frankly since Mr Abra.. | self-discovery | E.M. Forster | |
| 8e1aefa | Unless we remember we cannot understand. | understanding writing | E.M. Forster | |
| c5c504d | To attribute these two great developments to the Central Committee, is to take a very narrow view of civilization. The Central Committee announced the developments, it is true, but they were no more the cause of them than were the kings of the imperialistic period the cause of war. | E.M. Forster | ||
| 105c78d | Scheherazade avoided her fate because she knew how to wield the weapon of suspense -the only literary tool that has any effect upon tyrants and savages. | E.M. Forster | ||
| 0034852 | We come up against beauty here -- for the first time in our enquiry: beauty at which a novelist should never aim though he fails if he does not achieve it. I will conduct beauty to her proper place later on. Meanwhile please accept her as part of a completed plot. She looks a little surprised at being there, but beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face, as Botticelli knew when he painted her risen .. | botticelli novel plot surprise | E.M. Forster | |
| 2e3d7ea | I think everyone fails, but there are so many kinds of failure. | god success | E.M. Forster | |
| 4ce9398 | Abraham Lincoln had a soft spot for deserters, whom he called his "legs cases." Though many of his military commanders grumbled about Lincoln's leniency -- traditionally, runaways were shot -- the president preferred incarceration to execution, asking, "If Almighty God gives a man a cowardly pair of legs how can he help their running away with him?" | Sarah Vowell | ||
| daf63ba | it requires all my philosophy, and all my piety' to make peace... | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 78859bd | that August an ominous and unprecedented British armada of 450 ships and boats carrying forty-five thousand British soldiers and sailors, as well as the rented Germanic troops known as the Hessians (of Headless Horseman fame), assembled in New York Harbor | Sarah Vowell | ||
| f13603f | If we fail in our negotiation," Greene told Lafayette en route to d'Estaing's ship, "we shall at least get a good dinner." Washington should have chosen Greene, not Sullivan, to steer this mission. Besides his cool head and personal interest in helping his home state, Greene understood that whatever their shortcomings, the French could always be counted on to roast the hell out of a chicken. Greene" | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 833b633 | Still, as a kid, History Repeats Itself terrified me, mostly because I was a God-fearing child. And I mean that literally. God scared me stiff, what with the turning human beings into salt and getting them swallowed up by whales, plus the locusts and famines and, not least, making sure his own kid gets nailed to death onto wood. Every time someone would die -- a cousin or grandparent or Elvis -- some relative preacher would there-there it a.. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| e1bc187 | By journey's end the brides were much better acquainted with their grooms and more or less pleased with the matches. Sybil Bingham wrote in her diary, thanking God for answering her prayer for filling "the void" with a husband like Hiram, a "treasure rich and undeserved." Having read his insufferable memoir, "A Residence of Twenty-one Years in the Sandwich Islands", all I can say is: I'm happy for her?" | humor love marriage | Sarah Vowell | |
| 8eb4167 | Lafayette lifted his glass at one reception to toast 'the perpetual union of the United States,' adding, 'it has always saved us in time of storm; one day it will save the world.'" Whether" -- | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 404f5e6 | Married to a naval commander who happened to be Benjamin Franklin's great-great-grandson, Wainwright prayed to the graven image of Lafayette, since neither the president nor Congress seemed to be listening. "We, the women of the United States," she told the bronze Lafayette, "denied the liberty which you helped to gain, and for which we have asked in vain for sixty years, turn to you to plead for us. Speak, Lafayette, dead these hundred yea.. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 22adf1c | How sad is it that this tiff sort of cheers me up? 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? While | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 4a6e986 | The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States." More important, all of Jefferson's specific digs at the king were preceded by one self-evident fact that obliterated any and all justifications for monarchy, aristocracy, and colonialism until the end of time, even though neither its author nor his comrad.. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| e42f7ed | I have a policy about that word "soul." It is strictly prohibited except in cases of converstations having to do with okra recipes or Marvin Gaye." | Sarah Vowell | ||
| c8e8502 | Turgot turned out to be correct regarding this chilling prophecy: "War we ought to shun as the greatest of evils, since it will render impossible for a very long time, and perhaps forever, the reform which is absolutely necessary for the prosperity of the State and for the relief of the people." In other words, every cent the French government spent on guns for the Americans was another centime it would not have to spend on butter for the s.. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| c1251a5 | Picpus Cemetery, where Lafayette is buried under dirt from Bunker Hill. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 106cb83 | A humble, bootstrappy patriot, Knox wooed, then married Lucy Flucker, the highbrow daughter of the Loyalist governor of the province of Massachusetts. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| c15cfd4 | When Lafayette visited Monticello in 1824, his old friend Thomas Jefferson toasted him: "When I was stationed in his country for the purpose of cementing its friendship with ours, and of advancing our mutual interests, this friend of both, was my most powerful auxiliary and advocate. He made our cause his own . . . His influence and connections there were great. All doors of all departments were open to him at all times. In truth, I only he.. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| beddd3d | The fact that a child that age was allowed to go out looking for the four-legged serial killer that the king has dispatched his personal gun-bearer to track down speaks of an older, hands-off parenting style. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 357cd89 | I used to think John Waters movies were on the outlandish side until I came to Maryland. Klam and I stop for lunch at a dark roadside joint that feels like more of a throw-back than the Surratt House ever could. The vegetable of the day is succotash to give you an idea. Technically, it's a family restaurant, but it will only remind you of your family if your mom chain-smoked menthols. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 9f8af0d | and thus ever works the pallid academic mind, denying the real, exalting the fictitious and the false, incapable of adjusting itself to the flow of living things, to the reality and the pathos of man's follies, to the valiant hope that ever causes him to aspire, and again to aspire; that never lifts a hand in aid because it cannot . . . when what the world needs is courage, common sense and human sympathy, and a moral standard that is plain.. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 7fefe05 | did not hesitate to be disagreeable to preserve my independence"--applied" | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 9262908 | The model for South America was Broadway actress Maxine Elliot. North America, a pretty blonde, was modeled on Maud Coleman Woods of Charlottesville, Virginia. (Sadly, she would die of typhoid fever that summer, ten days before McKinley arrived in Buffalo, thereby never living to see herself on a coaster, every southern belle's dream.) | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 3c8ed66 | First, from this side of the twentieth century, apres strip malls, fast-food franchises, glass boxes, housing projects, and other architectural gaffes, it's fun to look back on this dilemma of to-column-or-not-to-column, because honestly, the only question most Americans ask about a new building at this point is basically: Is it a soul-sucking eyesore of cheap-ass despair? It's not? Whew. | Sarah Vowell |