E. M. Forster Quotes

I wrote my epitaph: He started out a particle and ended up a wave.

Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.

I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing.

I feel I'm moving toward as well as away from something, and anything is possible.

There's a terrible stillness. I notice a small tear in the wallpaper above her shoulder. I notice finger marks grimed on the light switch. Somewhere down in the house, a door opens and shuts. As Zoey turns to face me, I realize that life is made up of a series of moments, each one a journey to the end.

Life is a series of commas, not periods.

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

Why should I ask the wise men: Whence is my beginning? I am busy with the thought: Where will be my end?

Birth and death; we all move between these two unknowns.

The drama of life begins with a wail and ends with a sigh.

I feel like 'Harlem River' was me putting one foot out the door of New York, and 'Still Life' is between Point A and Point B. It's the grey area.

It's interesting--the way in which one has to balance life--because you have to know when to let go and when to pull back.... There's always some liminal (as opposed to subliminal) space in between which is harder to inhabit because it never feels as safe as moving from one extreme to another.

We're all travelers in this world. From the sweet grass to the packing house. Birth 'til death. We travel between the eternities.

I love borders. August is the border between summer and autumn; it is the most beautiful month I know. Twilight is the border between day and night, and the shore is the border between sea and land. The border is longing: when both have fallen in love but still haven't said anything. The border is to be on the way. It is the way that is the most important thing.

This is not a place, after all. It is BETWEEN places. This is NOWHERE. A brief thought: I could stay here, abandon my quest, hang forever in the void, safe and cold and alone.

Men live their lives trapped in an eternal present, between the mists of memory and the sea of shadow that is all we know of the days to come.

Each day is born with a sunrise and ends in a sunset, the same way we open our eyes to see the light, and close them to hear the dark. You have no control over how your story begins or ends. But by now, you should know that all things have an ending. Every spark returns to darkness. Every sound returns to silence. Every flower returns to sleep with the earth. The journey of the sun and moon is predictable. But yours, is your ultimate ART.

My mother could never have said she loved fall, but as she walked down the steps with her suitcase in hand toward the red Monte Carlo her husband had been waiting in for nearly an hour, she could have said that she respected its place as a mediator between two extremes. Fall came and went, while winter was endured and summer was revered. Fall was the repose that made both possible and bearable, and now here she was was with her husband next to her, heading headlong into an early-fall afternoon with only the vaguest ideas of who they were becoming and what came next.

I started thinking about how life is a lot like getting pushed out of a plane. You didn't ask to be here, none of us did. But we're all careening through space towards an eventual end that no one's gonna be able to put off. That's the only thing that's definite, this impact. So I started to think about how a lot of us fall at an incredible velocity, and it's over in the blink of an eye.

Midway upon the journey of our life

I guess what I'm passionate about is, I see so many things that I find that there's no real solution to, and you're only here for such a brief moment in time, even if you live to be a hundred years old. Yet, what happens within that time frame? So many things happen.

Life is a journey I don't have a map for.

I'm a dweller of the threshold and I'm waiting at the door, and I'm standing in the darkness, I don't want to wait no more.

I stared at the creased map on my wall, the thin green line connecting all the places I had read about. There they were, all the cities of my imaginary future, held together with tape and marker and pins. In six months, a lot had changed. There was no thin green line that could lead me to my future anymore. Just a girl.

...the long train ride was like traveling through limbo. You weren't anywhere when you were on a train, she decided. You weren't where you had been, and you weren't yet where you were going. You were nowhere. It might be beautiful outside the window-and it was, she had sense enough to realize that-but it wasn't anywhere to her, just a scene passing by that was framed by the train window. (p160)