Quote

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.

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
Would
Tree
Flowed
Life
Present
Deaths
Like
Moment
Stream
Born
Streams
Song
Passed
Moments
Senses
Rustled
Music
Seemed
Sharpened
Made
Continue
Apprehend

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Tolerance is just a makeshift, suitable for an overcrowded and overheated planet. It carries on when love gives out, and love generally gives out as soon as we move away from our home and our friends.
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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.
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I'd far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children.
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There has been, is, and always will be every conceivable type of person.
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There is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.
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Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer
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If only the sense of actuality can be lulled-and it sleeps for ever in most historians-there is no passion that cannot be gratified in the past.
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They had nothing in common but the English language.
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But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.
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It isn't possible to love and 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 by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.
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Intuition attracts those who wish to be spiritual without any bother, because it promises a heaven where the intuitions of others can be ignored.
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Democracy is not a Beloved Republic really, and never will be. But it is less hateful than other contemporary forms of government, and to that extent deserves our support.
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The advance of regret can be so gradual that it is impossible to say yesterday I was happy, today I am not.
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For it is a serious thing to have been watched. We all radiate something curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone.
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I really don't know what happens next -- one so seldom does.
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Hope, politeness, the blowing of a nose, the squeak of a boot, all produce boum.
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Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.
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We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
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No one is more triumphant than the man who chooses a worthy subject and masters all its facts.
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You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.
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