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One grows accustomed to being praised, or being blamed, or being advised, but it is unusual to be understood.

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
Accustomed
Unusual
Understood
Grows
Advised
Blamed
Praised

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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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Hope, politeness, the blowing of a nose, the squeak of a boot, all produce boum.
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If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.
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The novelist, unlike many of his colleagues, makes up a number of word-masses roughly describing himself (roughly: niceties shallcome later), gives them names and sex, assigns them plausible gestures, and causes them to speak by the use of inverted commas, and perhaps to behave consistently.
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Words deserted him immediately. He could only speak when he was not asked to.
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All that is observable in a man-that is to say his actions and such of his spiritual existence as can be deduced from his actions-falls into the domain of history.
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Human beings have their great chance in the novel.
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The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.
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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.
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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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It is the starved imagination, not the well nourished, that is afraid.
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When that strange race nears the dust and is condemned as untouchable, then nature remembers the physical perfection that she accomplished elsewhere, and throws out a god-not many, but one here and there, to prove to society how little its categories impress her.
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While her lips talked culture, her heart was planning to invite him to tea
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They cared for no one, they were outside humanity, and death, had it come, would only have continued their pursuit of a retreating horizon.
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There is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.
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The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.
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Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?
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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.
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Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.
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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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