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We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.

E. M. Forster

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E. M. Forster
Age: 91 †
Born: 1879
Born: January 1
Died: 1970
Died: June 7
Biographer
Essayist
Librettist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
London
England
Edward Morgan Forster
E Forster
EM Forster
Away
Praise
Safely
Cannot
Whose
Dangers
Past
Danger
Censorship
Enough
Present
Outcome
Willing
Outcomes
Tucked
Liberty
Libertarian
Amidst
Freedom
Admit
Foresee
Fear
Nervous
Nuisance

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By the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes--a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.
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At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
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One can run away from women, turn them out, or give in to them. No fourth course.
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Don't believe those lies about intellectual people. They're only written to soothe the majority.
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The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.
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England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature--for the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still, for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk.
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The present flowed by them like a stream. The tree rustled. It had made music before they were born, and would continue after their deaths, but its song was of the moment. The moment had passed. The tree rustled again. Their senses were sharpened, and they seemed to apprehend life. Life passed. The tree rustled again.
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The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken.
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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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Those who search for truth are too conscious of the maze to be hard on others...
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I do like Christmas on the whole.... In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But it is clumsier every year.
E. M. Forster
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Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.
E. M. Forster
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I only wish the poets would say this too: love is of the body not the body, but of the the body. Ah! the misery that would be saved if we confessed that! Ah! for a little directness to liberate the soul!
E. M. Forster
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Human beings have their great chance in the novel.
E. M. Forster
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All that is observable in a man-that is to say his actions and such of his spiritual existence as can be deduced from his actions-falls into the domain of history.
E. M. Forster
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They cared for no one, they were outside humanity, and death, had it come, would only have continued their pursuit of a retreating horizon.
E. M. Forster
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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
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The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world.
E. M. Forster
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Riposte of that old lady in the anecdote who was accused by her nieces of being illogical, Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish! How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?
E. M. Forster
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A critic has no right to the narrowness which is the frequent prerogative of the creative artist.
E. M. Forster