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For it is a serious thing to have been watched. We all radiate something curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone.

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
Thing
Something
Believe
Radiate
Curiously
Watched
Intimate
Serious
Alone

More quotes by E. M. Forster

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It is devilish difficult to criticise society & also create human beings.
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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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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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Expansion, that is the idea the novelist must cling to, not completion, not rounding off, but opening out.
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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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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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If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting--both for us and for her.
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The emotions may be endless. The more we express them, the more we may have to express.
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Of course he despised the world as a whole every thoughtful man should it is almost a test of refinement.
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As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take the examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one be a penny the stupider.
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Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it.
E. M. Forster
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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.
E. M. Forster
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Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
E. M. Forster
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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.
E. M. Forster
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I do not believe in Belief.
E. M. Forster
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Hope, politeness, the blowing of a nose, the squeak of a boot, all produce boum.
E. M. Forster
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The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.
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It is so difficult - at least, I find it difficult - to understand people who speak the truth.
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She stopped and leant her elbows against the parapet of the embankment. He did likewise. There is at times a magic in identity of position it is one of the things that have suggested to us eternal comradeship.
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Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties. You will have noticed in daily life that when people are inquisitive they nearly always have bad memories and are usually stupid at bottom.
E. M. Forster