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It is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.

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
Character
Thus
Life
Function
Victoria
Produce
Novelist
Source
Queen
Fiction
Reveal
Known
Queens
History
Novelists
Tell
Hidden

More quotes by E. M. Forster

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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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One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.
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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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Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
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But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.
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A mirror does not develop because an historical pageant passes in front of it. It only develops when it gets a fresh coat of quicksilver in other words, when it acquires new sensitiveness and the novel's success lies in its own sensitiveness, not in the success of its subject matter.
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Happiness in the ordinary sense is not what one needs in life, though one is right to aim at it. The true satisfaction is to come through, and see those whom one lives come through.
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Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. We move between two darkness's.
E. M. Forster
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The historian records, but the novelist creates.
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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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If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
E. M. Forster
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I don't know what to think until I see what I've said.
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It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die--neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave.
E. M. Forster
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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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She loved him absolutely, perhaps for half an hour.
E. M. Forster
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It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools.
E. M. Forster
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It comes to this then: there always have been people like me and always will be, and generally they have been persecuted.
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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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One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves.
E. M. Forster
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Man can learn everything if he will but try.
E. M. Forster