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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.

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
Rather
Detectives
Sometimes
Element
Great
Plot
Surprise
Importance
Elements
Mystery
Called
Detective

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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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One grows accustomed to being praised, or being blamed, or being advised, but it is unusual to be understood.
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Only connect!...Only connect the prose and the passion.
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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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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.
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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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Reverence is fatal to literature.
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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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English literature is a flying fish.
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All this fame and money, which have so thrilled me when they came to others, leave me cold when they come to me. I am not an ascetic, but I don't know what to do with them, and my daily life has never been so trying, and there is no one to fill it emotionally.
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Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.
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Solidity, caution, integrity, efficiency. Lack of imagination, hypocrisy. These qualities characterize the middle classes in everycountry, but in England they are national characteristics.
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The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.
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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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Words deserted him immediately. He could only speak when he was not asked to.
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. . . life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t'other from which . . .
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Don't be mysterious there isn't the time.
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I have said that each aspect of the novel demands a different quality of the reader. Well, the prophetic aspect demands two qualities: humility and the suspension of the sense of humour.
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She stopped and leant her elbows against the parapet of the embankment. He did likewise. There is at times a magic in identity of position it is one of the things that have suggested to us eternal comradeship.
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