Quote

When we were only acquaintances, you let me be myself, but now you're always protecting me... I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. Can't I be trusted to face the truth but I must get it second-hand through you? A woman's place!

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
Woman
Trusted
Place
Protected
Hands
Insult
Ladylike
Truth
Choose
Acquaintances
Right
Second
Shield
Must
Hand
Shields
Always
Face
Acquaintance
Faces
Protecting

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How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
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She must be assured that it is not a criminal offense to love at first sight.
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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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Pathos, piety, courage, they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.
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Do you suppose there's any difference between spring in nature and spring in man? But there we go, praising the one and condemning the other as improper, ashamed that the same laws work eternally through both.
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Towns are after all excrescences, grey fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.
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The advance of regret can be so gradual that it is impossible to say yesterday I was happy, today I am not.
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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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At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
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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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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.
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When that strange race nears the dust and is condemned as untouchable, then nature remembers the physical perfection that she accomplished elsewhere, and throws out a god-not many, but one here and there, to prove to society how little its categories impress her.
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I really don't know what happens next -- one so seldom does.
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Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. We move between two darkness's.
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I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place.
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The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.
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It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.
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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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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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I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.
E. M. Forster