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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.

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
Doe
Front
Acquire
Quicksilver
Matter
Lies
Fresh
Sensitiveness
Subjects
Mirror
Acquires
Gets
Mirrors
Pageant
Novel
Develop
Develops
Lying
Historical
Coat
Success
Subject
Coats
Words
Fronts
Passes

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You confuse what's important with what's impressive.
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The historian records, but the novelist creates.
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It is so difficult - at least, I find it difficult - to understand people who speak the truth.
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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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I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.
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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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Excuse my mistakes, realize my limitations. Life is not easy as we know it on the earth.
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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.
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Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.
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He doesn't want you to be real, and to think and to live. He doesn't love you. But I love you. I want you to have your own thoughts and ideas and feelings, even when I hold you in my arms.
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There has been, is, and always will be every conceivable type of person.
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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.
E. M. Forster
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Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time - beautiful?
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We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
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We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.
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No one is more triumphant than the man who chooses a worthy subject and masters all its facts.
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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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Intuition attracts those who wish to be spiritual without any bother, because it promises a heaven where the intuitions of others can be ignored.
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Books have to be read it is the only way of discovering what they contain.
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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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