Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.
E. M. FORSTERDon’t begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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But the body is deeper than the soul and its secrets inscrutable.
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The historian records, but the novelist creates.
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For it is a serious thing to have been watched. We all radiate something curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone.
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Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
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Aziz winked at him slowly and said: “…There are many ways of being a man; mine is to express what is deepest in my heart.
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It makes a difference doesn’t it, whether we fully fence ourselves in, or whether we are fenced out by the barriers of others?
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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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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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A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
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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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One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
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One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.
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She had been so wicked that in all her life she had done only one good deed-given an onion to a beggar. So she went to hell. As she lay in torment she saw the onion, lowered down from heaven by an angel. She caught hold of it. He began to pull her up.
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School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible.
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She stopped and leant her elbows against the parapet of the embankment. He did likewise. There is at times a magic in identity of position; it is one of the things that have suggested to us eternal comradeship.
E. M. FORSTER