The other damned saw what was happening and caught hold of it too. She was indignant and cried, “Let go-it’s my onion,” and as soon as she said, “my onion,” the stalk broke and she fell back into the flames.
E. M. FORSTERSchool 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.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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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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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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I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I’d like to be.
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If we act the truth the people who really love us are sure to come back to us in the long run
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One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
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Don’t begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed.
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It isn’t possible to love and to part.
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Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. I do not believe in it, for its own sake, at all… My lawgivers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul.
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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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We move between two darknesses.
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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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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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The sort of poetry I seek only resides in objects Man can’t touch – like England ‘s grass network of lanes 100 years ago, but today he can destroy them and only Lord Farrer keeps him from doing it.
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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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We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
E. M. FORSTER