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I don't think literature will be purged until its philosophic pretentiousness is extruded, and I shant live to see that purge, nor perhaps when it has happened will anything survive.

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
Perhaps
Happened
Literature
Anything
Pretentiousness
Live
Purged
Think
Purge
Thinking
Philosophic
Survive

More quotes by E. M. Forster

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Don't believe those lies about intellectual people. They're only written to soothe the majority.
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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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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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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.
E. M. Forster
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Chess is a forcing house where the fruits of character can ripen more fully than in life
E. M. Forster
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How few writers can prostitute all their powers!
E. M. Forster
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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.
E. M. Forster
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All invitations must proceed from heaven perhaps perhaps it is futile for men to initiate their own unity, they do but widen the gulfs between them by the attempt.
E. M. Forster
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Without form, the sensitiveness vanishes.
E. M. Forster
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The present flowed by them like a stream. The tree rustled. It had made music before they were born, and would continue after their deaths, but its song was of the moment. The moment had passed. The tree rustled again. Their senses were sharpened, and they seemed to apprehend life. Life passed. The tree rustled again.
E. M. Forster
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Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.
E. M. Forster
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For it is a serious thing to have been watched. We all radiate something curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone.
E. M. Forster
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The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.
E. M. Forster
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This desire to govern a woman -- it lies very deep, and men and women must fight it together.... But I do love you surely in a better way then he does. He thought. Yes -- really in a better way. I want you to have your own thoughts even when I hold you in my arms.
E. M. Forster
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The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken.
E. M. Forster
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As her time in Florence drew to a close she was only at ease amongst those to whom she felt indifferent.
E. M. Forster
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I hated the idleness, the stupidity, the respectability, the petty unselfishness.
E. M. Forster
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Do you remember Italy?
E. M. Forster
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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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There was something better in life than this rub­bish, if only he could get to it—love—nobility—big spaces where passion clasped peace, spaces no science could reach, but they existed for ever, full of woods some of them, and arched with majestic sky and a friend. . .
E. M. Forster