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

More quotes by 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.
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I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.
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Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time - beautiful?
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Human beings have their great chance in the novel.
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I am so used to seeing the sort of play which deals with one man and two women. They do not leave me with the feeling I have made a full theatrical meal they do not give me the experience of the multiplicity of life.
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Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown
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When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.
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Only connect!...Only connect the prose and the passion.
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It is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.
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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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Life - No, I've nothing to teach you about it for the moment. May be writing about it another week.
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You confuse what's important with what's impressive.
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Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.
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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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You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.
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Their quarrel was no more surprising than are most quarrels — inevitable at the time, incredible afterwards.
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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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All men are equal — all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas.
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Romance only dies with life. No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of us. But there is a spurious sentiment which cannot resist the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque. A touch will loosen it, and the sooner it goes from us the better.
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