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It is easy to sympathize at a distance,' said an old gentleman with a beard. 'I value more the kind word that is spoken close to my ear.

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
Beard
Values
Spoken
Easy
Gentleman
Kind
Distance
Ears
Close
Value
Sympathize
Word

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I only wish the poets would say this too: love is of the body not the body, but of the the body. Ah! the misery that would be saved if we confessed that! Ah! for a little directness to liberate the soul!
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They cared for no one, they were outside humanity, and death, had it come, would only have continued their pursuit of a retreating horizon.
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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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The book [ A Passage to India ] shows signs of fatigue and disillusionment but it has chapters of clear and triumphant beauty, and above all it makes us wonder, what will he write next?
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I am an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort.
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It makes a difference doesn't it, whether we fully fence ourselves in, or whether we are fenced out by the barriers of others?
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The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected.
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This element of surprise or mystery the detective element as it is sometimes rather emptily called is of great importance in a plot.
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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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There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.
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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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Without form, the sensitiveness vanishes.
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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 hated the idleness, the stupidity, the respectability, the petty unselfishness.
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There is much good luck in the world, but it is luck. We are none of us safe. We are children, playing or quarrelling on the line.
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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 more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.
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Love is always being given where it is not required.
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Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.
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Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?
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