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But I have seen my obstacles: trivialities, learning and poetry. This last needs explaining: the old artist's readiness to dissolve characters into a haze. Characters cannot come alive and fight and guide the world unless the novelist wants them to remain characters.

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
Needs
Alive
Remain
Dissolve
World
Fighting
Characters
Readiness
Lasts
Poetry
Novelist
Last
Unless
Explaining
Artist
Fight
Novelists
Cannot
Wants
Guide
Trivialities
Character
Learning
Guides
Triviality
Come
Seen
Obstacles
Haze

More quotes by E. M. Forster

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The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.
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Expansion, that is the idea the novelist must cling to, not completion, not rounding off, but opening out.
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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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...the true spirit of gastronomic joylessness. Porridge fills the Englishman up, and prunes clear him out.
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He educated Maurice, or rather his spirit educated Maurice's spirit, for they themselves became equal. Neither thought Am I led am I leading? Love had caught him out of triviality and Maurice out of bewilderment in order that two imperfect souls might touch perfection.
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How few writers can prostitute all their powers!
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A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.
E. M. Forster
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You confuse what's important with what's impressive.
E. M. Forster
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Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.
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A novel must give a sense of permanence as well as a sense of life.
E. M. Forster
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What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?
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There are moments when the inner life actually 'pays,' when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use.
E. M. Forster
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I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place.
E. M. Forster
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Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.
E. M. Forster
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Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly they are still entangled with the desire for ownership.
E. M. Forster
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The traveller who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or the corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it.
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I don't know what to think until I see what I've said.
E. M. Forster
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Only connect!...Only connect the prose and the passion.
E. M. Forster
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Don't believe those lies about intellectual people. They're only written to soothe the majority.
E. M. Forster
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She must be assured that it is not a criminal offense to love at first sight.
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