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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Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something vulgarity, concealing something.
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Hope, politeness, the blowing of a nose, the squeak of a boot, all produce boum.
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Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.
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I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.
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Reverence is fatal to literature.
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Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
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Ideas are fatal to caste.
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All a child's life depends on the ideal it has of its parents. Destroy that and everything goes — morals, behaviour, everything. Absolute trust in some one else is the essence of education.
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He had shown her all the workings of his soul, mistaking this for love.
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There are moments when the inner life actually 'pays,' when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use.
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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.
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This desire to govern a woman -- it lies very deep, and men and women must fight it together.... But I do love you surely in a better way then he does. He thought. Yes -- really in a better way. I want you to have your own thoughts even when I hold you in my arms.
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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.
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Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time). It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West.
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Do you suppose there's any difference between spring in nature and spring in man? But there we go, praising the one and condemning the other as improper, ashamed that the same laws work eternally through both.
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Love felt and returned, love which our bodies exact and our hearts have transfigured, love which is the most real thing that we shall ever meet, reappeared now as the world's enemy, and she must stifle it.
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. . . life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t'other from which . . .
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Human beings have their great chance in the novel.
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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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We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
E. M. Forster