Quote

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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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
Human
Interests
Ulysses
Humans
Dog
Simplification
Make
Succeed
Mud
Hell
Sweetness
Interest
Dirt
Universe
Cover
Light
Failed
Dogged
Character
Attempt
Inverted

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At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
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It comes to this then: there always have been people like me and always will be, and generally they have been persecuted.
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One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.
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I hated the idleness, the stupidity, the respectability, the petty unselfishness.
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Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.
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Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. We move between two darkness's.
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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.
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I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man's pleasure when they come a cropper.
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While her lips talked culture, her heart was planning to invite him to tea
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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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You talk as if a god had made the Machine, cried the other. I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but not everything.
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Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!
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We may divide characters into flat and round.
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It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.
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For you cannot have gentility without paying for it.
E. M. Forster
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It is easy to sympathize at a distance,' said an old gentleman with a beard. 'I value more the kind word that is spoken close to my ear.
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Humility is a quality for which I have only a limited admiration. In many phases of life it is a great mistake and degenerates into defensiveness or hypocrisy.
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.
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Do not be proud of your inconsistency. It is a pity, it is a pity that we should be equipped like this. It is a pity that Man cannot be at the same time impressive and truthful.
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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