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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.
E. M. Forster
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I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I'd like to be.
E. M. Forster
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The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.
E. M. Forster
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If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
E. M. Forster
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Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.
E. M. Forster
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The woman who can't influence her husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herself.
E. M. Forster
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I'm a holy man minus the holiness.
E. M. Forster
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Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.
E. M. Forster
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No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour.
E. M. Forster
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Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.
E. M. Forster
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Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
E. M. Forster
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One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.
E. M. Forster
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The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.
E. M. Forster
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To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.
E. M. Forster
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For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better.
E. M. Forster
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If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.
E. M. Forster
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I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.
E. M. Forster
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America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for. It will probably be interesting, and it is sure to be large.
E. M. Forster
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At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
E. M. Forster
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Your letter firmed me up a lot. It certainly is a comfort to know that my work is respected by someone whom I respect and am as fond as you. It confirms my beliefe that life is notall nonsense and cruelty-the inversion of Victorian complacency-but has hard spots of sense and love bobbing about in it here and there.
E. M. Forster
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Before the civil war, Pottibakia was a normal member of the Comity of Nations. She erected tariff walls, broke treaties, persecuted minorities, obstructed at conferences unless she was convinced there was no danger of a satisfactory solution; then she strained every nerve in the cause of peace.
E. M. Forster
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Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.
E. M. Forster
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Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
E. M. Forster
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It isn’t possible to love and to part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know from experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.
E. M. Forster
