“Tolerance is a very dull virtue. It is boring. Unlike love, it has always had a bad press. It is negative. It merely means putting up with people, being able to stand things.”
E.M. Forster
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Tolerance
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“Paganism is infectious–more infectious than diphtheria or piety….”
E.M. Forster
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Religion
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“Yes–oh, dear, yes–the novel tells a story.”
E.M. Forster
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
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“The novelist, unlike many of his colleagues, makes up a number of word-masses roughly describing himself (roughly: niceties shall come 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.”
E.M. Forster
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
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“The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then queen died of grief” is a plot.”
E.M. Forster
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
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“The final test of a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.”
E.M. Forster
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
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“England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature–for the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still, for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk.”
E.M. Forster
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
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“One’s favorite book is as elusive as one’s favorite pudding.”
E.M. Forster
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
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“English literature is a flying fish.”
E.M. Forster
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
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“Reverence is fatal to literature.”
E.M. Forster
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
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“The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.”
E.M. Forster
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
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“We are all like Scheherazade’s husband, in that we want to know what happens next.”
E.M. Forster
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
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“He had robbed the body of its taint, the world’s taunts of their sting; he had shown her the holiness of direct desire.”
E.M. Forster
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Sex
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“Not only in sex, but in all things men have moved blindly, have evolved out of slime to dissolve into it when this accident of consequences is over.”
E.M. Forster
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Sex
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“He was too delicate to admit, even to himself, the desirability of marrying two thousand a year.”
E.M. Forster
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Marriage
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“Why does the soul always require a machine-gun?”
E.M. Forster
Submitted by Quonation |Category: War
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“So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.”
E.M. Forster
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Government
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“Failure or success seem to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wriggling, of fighting with their star or against it, and in the whole universe the only really interesting movement is this wriggle.”
E.M. Forster
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Destiny
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“For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better.”
E.M. Forster
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Vanity
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“They dealt with so much and they had experienced so little.”
E.M. Forster
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Experience
