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I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's.

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
England
Novel
Almost
Death
Long
Completed

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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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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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Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.
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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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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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Money pads the edges of things.
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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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We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.
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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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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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But after all, what have we to do with taverns? Real menace belongs to the drawing-room.
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For you cannot have gentility without paying for it.
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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.
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...the true spirit of gastronomic joylessness. Porridge fills the Englishman up, and prunes clear him out.
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I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.
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In the creative state a man is taken out of himself.
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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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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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It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools.
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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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