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At times our need for a sympathetic gesture is so great that we care not what exactly it signifies or how much we may have to pay for it afterwards.

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
Great
Afterwards
Needs
Gestures
Much
Exactly
Pay
Times
Care
Signifies
May
Gesture
Need
Sympathetic

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The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.
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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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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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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.
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I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.
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One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves.
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I'd far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children.
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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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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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Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.
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I am actually what my age and my upbringing have made me - a bourgeois who adheres to the British constitution, adheres to it rather than supports it, and the fact that this isn't dignified doesn't worry me.
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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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I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult.
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