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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.

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
Reading
Revealed
Read
Discovering
Book
Luck
Long
Method
Assimilation
Way
Worse
Savage
Time
West
Tribes
Takes
Savages
Books
Contain

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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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It is easy to face Death and Fate, and the things that sound so dreadful. It is on my muddles that I look back with horror--on thethings that I might have avoided.
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You confuse what's important with what's impressive.
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The book [ A Passage to India ] shows signs of fatigue and disillusionment but it has chapters of clear and triumphant beauty, and above all it makes us wonder, what will he write next?
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Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.
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It is devilish difficult to criticise society & also create human beings.
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All this fame and money, which have so thrilled me when they came to others, leave me cold when they come to me. I am not an ascetic, but I don't know what to do with them, and my daily life has never been so trying, and there is no one to fill it emotionally.
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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.
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While her lips talked culture, her heart was planning to invite him to tea
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Lord I disbelieve - help thou my unbelief.
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Chess is a forcing house where the fruits of character can ripen more fully than in life
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Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind.
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Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.
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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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Man can learn everything if he will but try.
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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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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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A novel must give a sense of permanence as well as a sense of life.
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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?
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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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