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

More quotes by E. M. Forster

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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.
E. M. Forster
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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?
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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I am actually what my age and my upbringing have made me - a bourgeois who adheres to the British constitution, adheres to it rather than supports it, and the fact that this isn't dignified doesn't worry me.
E. M. Forster
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While her lips talked culture, her heart was planning to invite him to tea
E. M. Forster
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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.
E. M. Forster
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Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
E. M. Forster
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It is devilish difficult to criticise society & also create human beings.
E. M. Forster
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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.
E. M. Forster
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...the true spirit of gastronomic joylessness. Porridge fills the Englishman up, and prunes clear him out.
E. M. Forster
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The historian records, but the novelist creates.
E. M. Forster
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A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.
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.
E. M. Forster
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Aziz winked at him slowly and said: “...There are many ways of being a man mine is to express what is deepest in my heart.
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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Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.
E. M. Forster
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This solitude opressed her she was accustomed to have her thoughts confirmed by others or, at all events, contradicted it was too dreadful not to know whether she was thinking right or wrong.
E. M. Forster
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If God could tell the story of the Universe, the Universe would become fictitious.
E. M. Forster
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I am an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort.
E. M. Forster
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What the world most needs today are negative virtues - not minding people, not being huffy, touchy, irritable or revengeful.
E. M. Forster