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Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?

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
Turn
Turns
Happiness
Often
Happens
Find
Boxes

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Ideas are fatal to caste.
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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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The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.
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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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Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind.
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But I have seen my obstacles: trivialities, learning and poetry. This last needs explaining: the old artist's readiness to dissolve characters into a haze. Characters cannot come alive and fight and guide the world unless the novelist wants them to remain characters.
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He educated Maurice, or rather his spirit educated Maurice's spirit, for they themselves became equal. Neither thought Am I led am I leading? Love had caught him out of triviality and Maurice out of bewilderment in order that two imperfect souls might touch perfection.
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The woman who can't influence her husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herself.
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Pathos, piety, courage, they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.
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There has been, is, and always will be every conceivable type of person.
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There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.
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When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love it is one of the moments for which the world was made.
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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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One grows accustomed to being praised, or being blamed, or being advised, but it is unusual to be understood.
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One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.
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I don't know what to think until I see what I've said.
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What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
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What the world most needs today are negative virtues - not minding people, not being huffy, touchy, irritable or revengeful.
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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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