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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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They had nothing in common but the English language.
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England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.
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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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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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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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I don't think literature will be purged until its philosophic pretentiousness is extruded, and I shant live to see that purge, nor perhaps when it has happened will anything survive.
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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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She must be assured that it is not a criminal offense to love at first sight.
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A critic has no right to the narrowness which is the frequent prerogative of the creative artist.
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Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand.
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The Germans are called brutal, the Spanish cruel, the Americans superficial, and so on but we are perfide Albion, the island of hypocrites, the people who have built up an Empire with a Bible in one hand, a pistol in the other, and financial concessions in both pockets. Is the charge true? I think it is.
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Books have to be read it is the only way of discovering what they contain.
E. M. Forster
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It is the starved imagination, not the well nourished, that is afraid.
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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
E. M. Forster
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It is devilish difficult to criticise society & also create human beings.
E. M. Forster
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[...] it is right to be kind and even sacrifice ourselves to people who need kindness and lie in our way - otherwise, besides failing to help them, we run into the aridity of self-development. To seek for recipients of one's goodness, to play the Potted Jesus leads to the contray the Christian danger.
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Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?
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Ulysses ... is a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud, an inverted Victorianism, an attempt to make crossness and dirt succeed where sweetness and light failed, a simplification of the human character in the interests of Hell.
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Happiness in the ordinary sense is not what one needs in life, though one is right to aim at it. The true satisfaction is to come through, and see those whom one lives come through.
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Excuse my mistakes, realize my limitations. Life is not easy as we know it on the earth.
E. M. Forster