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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.

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
Feel
Produce
Feels
Blood
Great
Pleasure
Always
Often
Uniformity
Men
Around
Distrust
Littles
Pool
Little
Desert
Come
Greatness

More quotes by E. M. Forster

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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.
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Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties. You will have noticed in daily life that when people are inquisitive they nearly always have bad memories and are usually stupid at bottom.
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But I have seen my obstacles: trivialities, learning and poetry. This last needs explaining: the old artist's readiness to dissolve characters into a haze. Characters cannot come alive and fight and guide the world unless the novelist wants them to remain characters.
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Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
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Of course he despised the world as a whole every thoughtful man should it is almost a test of refinement.
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It is easy to sympathize at a distance,' said an old gentleman with a beard. 'I value more the kind word that is spoken close to my ear.
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He had shown her all the workings of his soul, mistaking this for love.
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The novelist, unlike many of his colleagues, makes up a number of word-masses roughly describing himself (roughly: niceties shallcome later), gives them names and sex, assigns them plausible gestures, and causes them to speak by the use of inverted commas, and perhaps to behave consistently.
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A novel must give a sense of permanence as well as a sense of life.
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Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due - she reminds us too much of a prima donna.
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Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind.
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When love flies it is remembered not as love but as something else. Blessed are the uneducated, who forget it entirely, and are never conscious of folly or pruriency in the past, of long aimless conversations.
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The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.
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Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown
E. M. Forster
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Reverence is fatal to literature.
E. M. Forster
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This solitude opressed her she was accustomed to have her thoughts confirmed by others or, at all events, contradicted it was too dreadful not to know whether she was thinking right or wrong.
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There was something better in life than this rub­bish, if only he could get to it—love—nobility—big spaces where passion clasped peace, spaces no science could reach, but they existed for ever, full of woods some of them, and arched with majestic sky and a friend. . .
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Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something vulgarity, concealing something.
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She must be assured that it is not a criminal offense to love at first sight.
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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.
E. M. Forster