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

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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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What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
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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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Chess is a forcing house where the fruits of character can ripen more fully than in life
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Life - No, I've nothing to teach you about it for the moment. May be writing about it another week.
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For you cannot have gentility without paying for it.
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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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Excuse my mistakes, realize my limitations. Life is not easy as we know it on the earth.
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All a child's life depends on the ideal it has of its parents. Destroy that and everything goes — morals, behaviour, everything. Absolute trust in some one else is the essence of education.
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If God could tell the story of the Universe, the Universe would become fictitious.
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English literature is a flying fish.
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[...] it is right to be kind and even sacrifice ourselves to people who need kindness and lie in our way - otherwise, besides failing to help them, we run into the aridity of self-development. To seek for recipients of one's goodness, to play the Potted Jesus leads to the contray the Christian danger.
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The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.
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Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.
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Are not beauty and delicacy the same?
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Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. We move between two darkness's.
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God is not Love in the East. He is Power, although Mercy may temper it.
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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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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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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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