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The traveller who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or the corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it.

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
May
Sky
Live
Blue
Giotto
Nothing
Return
Papacy
Men
Study
Tactile
Gone
Traveller
Values
Italy
Remember
Remembering
Women
Corruption

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She must be assured that it is not a criminal offense to love at first sight.
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What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
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Tolerance is just a makeshift, suitable for an overcrowded and overheated planet. It carries on when love gives out, and love generally gives out as soon as we move away from our home and our friends.
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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.
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Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. We move between two darkness's.
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Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer
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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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Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.
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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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A novel must give a sense of permanence as well as a sense of life.
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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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The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal. Both assumptions are false: both of them must be accepted as true if we are to go on eating and working and loving, and are to keep open a few breathing holes for the human spirit.
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To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge the poor cannot afford it.
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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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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.
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How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
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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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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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My law-givers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul.
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God is not Love in the East. He is Power, although Mercy may temper it.
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