E. M. Forster Quotes
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Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards.
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The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.
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Reverence is fatal to literature.
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Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
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The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.
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At the side of the everlasting why, is a yes, and a yes, and a yes.
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There is much good luck in the world, but it is luck. We are none of us safe. We are children, playing or quarrelling on the line.
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I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man's pleasure when they come a cropper.
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A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense, Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.
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Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!
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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 interruption of the audience on to the stage, and all our carefully planned gesture mean nothing, or mean too much.
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Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.
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It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools.
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Two cheers for Democracy; one because it admits variety, and two because it permits criticism.
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Happiness in the ordinary sense is not what one needs in life, though one is right to aim at it. The true satisfaction is to come through and see those whom one loves come through.
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Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another.
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One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
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The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.
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Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.
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The people I admire most are those who are sensitive and want to create something or discover something, and do not see life in terms of power.
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Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and of the recipient.
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If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting--both for us and for her.
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Tolerance is a very dull virtue. It is boring. Unlike love, it has always had a bad press. It is negative. It merely means putting up with people, being able to stand things.
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Adventures do occur, but not punctually.