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What the world most needs today are negative virtues - not minding people, not being huffy, touchy, irritable or revengeful.

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
Today
Needs
Revengeful
World
Irritable
People
Minding
Touchy
Virtues
Negative
Virtue

More quotes by E. M. Forster

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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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Expansion, that is the idea the novelist must cling to, not completion, not rounding off, but opening out.
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But after all, what have we to do with taverns? Real menace belongs to the drawing-room.
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We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.
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It is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.
E. M. Forster
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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.
E. M. Forster
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But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.
E. M. Forster
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Love felt and returned, love which our bodies exact and our hearts have transfigured, love which is the most real thing that we shall ever meet, reappeared now as the world's enemy, and she must stifle it.
E. M. Forster
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Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.
E. M. Forster
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This element of surprise or mystery the detective element as it is sometimes rather emptily called is of great importance in a plot.
E. M. Forster
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Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand.
E. M. Forster
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Some reviews give pain. This is regrettable, but no author has the right to whine. He was not obliged to be an author. He invited publicity, and he must take the publicity that comes along.
E. M. Forster
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All this fame and money, which have so thrilled me when they came to others, leave me cold when they come to me. I am not an ascetic, but I don't know what to do with them, and my daily life has never been so trying, and there is no one to fill it emotionally.
E. M. Forster
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Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it.
E. M. Forster
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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.
E. M. Forster
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I am an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort.
E. M. Forster
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Human beings have their great chance in the novel.
E. M. Forster
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I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.
E. M. Forster
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It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die--neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave.
E. M. Forster
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Reverence is fatal to literature.
E. M. Forster