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01dd0fe
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Boys are marvellous creatures. Perhaps they will sink below the brutes; perhaps they will attain to a woman's tenderness.
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E.M. Forster |
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baf292b
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She had not died there. A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which society would measure the quick motions of man.
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E.M. Forster |
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fc81af7
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Nonsense of this type is more difficult to combat than a solid lie. It hides in rubbish heaps and moves when no one is looking.
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E.M. Forster |
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9f95c98
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He did not know, but presently he would know. Great is information, and she shall prevail.
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E.M. Forster |
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c452ec6
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Yet complicated people were getting wet - not only the shepherds. For instance, the piano-tuner was sopping. So was the vicar's wife. So were the lieutenant and the peevish damsels in his Battlesden car. Gallantry, charity, and art pursued their various missions, perspiring and muddy, while out on the slopes beyond them stood the eternal man and the eternal dog, guarding eternal sheep until the world is vegetarian.
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wet
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E.M. Forster |
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835f7a8
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So never give in," continued the girl, and restated again and again the vague yet convincing plea that the Invisible lodges against the Visible. Her excitement grew as she tried to cut the rope that fastened Leonard to the earth. Woven of bitter experience, it resisted her. Presently the waitress entered and gave her a letter from Margaret. Another note, addressed to Leonard, was inside. They read them, listening to the murmurings of the ri..
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letter
river
water
resistance
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E.M. Forster |
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ccb7111
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For that little incident had impressed the three women more than might be supposed. It remained as a goblin footfall, as a hint that all is not for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and that beneath these superstructures of wealth and art there wanders an ill-fed boy, who has recovered his umbrella indeed, but who has left no address behind him, and no name.
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E.M. Forster |
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edaa008
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Give me life, with its struggles and victories, with its failures and hatreds, with its deep moral meaning and its unknown goal!
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E.M. Forster |
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5562c37
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What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?
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E.M. Forster |
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3620248
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Secrecy has this disadvantage: we lose the sense of proportion; we cannot tell whether our secret is important or not.
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E.M. Forster |
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918b53a
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One. Margaret's own faith held firm. She knew the human soul will be merged, if it be merged at all, with the stars and the sea.
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E.M. Forster |
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22990c8
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The present flowed by them like a stream. The tree rustled. It had made music before they were born, and would continue after their deaths, but its song was of the moment. The moment had passed. The tree rustled again. Their senses were sharpened, and they seemed to apprehend life. Life passed. The tree rustled again.
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E.M. Forster |
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abb7a37
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It's better to be fooled than to be suspicious.
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E.M. Forster |
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3aca489
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But let yourself go. You are inclined to get muddled, if I may judge from last night. Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them. By understanding George you may learn to understand yourself. It will be good for both of you.
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E.M. Forster |
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838a2e7
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it was English, and the wych-elm that she saw from the window was an English tree. No report had prepared her for its peculiar glory. It was neither warrior, nor lover, nor god; in none of these roles do the English excel. It was a comrade bending over the house, strength and adventure in its roots, but in its utmost fingers tenderness, and the girth, that a dozen men could not have spanned, became in the end evanescent, till pale bud clust..
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E.M. Forster |
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c7d5887
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My conviction," says the mystic, "gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it," and they had agreed that there was something beyond life's daily grey."
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E.M. Forster |
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54caa0b
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Every life ought to contain both a turn and a return.
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E.M. Forster |
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cdc3f98
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The melody rose, unprofitably magical. It broke; it was resumed broken, not marching once from the cradle to the grave. The sadness of the incomplete--the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art--throbbed in its disjected phrases, and made the nerves of the audience throb. Not thus had she played on the little draped piano at the Bertolini, and "Too much Schumann" was not the remark that Mr. Beebe had passed to himself when she ..
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E.M. Forster |
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2eee26c
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It will be generally admitted that Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.
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E.M. Forster |
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2205950
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There stood a young man who had the figure of a Greek athlete and the face of an English one...Just where he began to be beautiful the clothes started.
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E.M. Forster |
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a504726
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He has dreams--not exactly spiritual dreams: but dreams of the tangible and the actual: robust dreams, which take him, not to heaven, but another earth.
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E.M. Forster |
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9efe492
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They had tried to reproduce their own attitude to life upon the stage, and to dress up as the middle-class English people they actually were.
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E.M. Forster |
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35b059a
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She wandered as though in a dream, through the wavering sea of barley, touched with crimson stains of poppies. All unobserved, he came to her...There came from his lips no wordy protestations such as formal lovers use. No eloquence was his, nor did he suffer for lack of it. He simply enfolded her in his manly arms...
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E.M. Forster |
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3319b1e
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He questioned Maurice, who, when he grasped the point, was understood to reply that deeds are more important than words.
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E.M. Forster |
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2f95903
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Mr. Herriton, don't - please, Mr. Herriton - a dentist. His father's a dentist." Philip gave a cry of personal disgust and pain. He shuddered all over, and edged away from his companion. A dentist! A dentist at Monteriano. A dentist in fairyland! False teeth and laughing gas and the tilting chair at a place which knew the Etruscan League, and the Pax Romana, and Alaric himself, and the Countess Matilda, and the Middle Ages, all fighting an..
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romance
italy
disgust
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E.M. Forster |
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680e6c3
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It all turns on affection now," said Margaret. "Affection. Don't you see?... And affection, when reciprocated, gives rights. Put that down in your notebook, Mr. Mansbridge. It's a useful formula."
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E.M. Forster |
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5bde9fe
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Ronny's religion was of the sterilized Public School brand, which never goes bad, even in the tropics. Wherever he entered, mosque, cave or temple, he retained the spiritual outlook of the fifth form, and condemned as 'weakening' any attempt to understand them.
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spirituality
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E.M. Forster |
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45f7195
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The Emersons who were at Florence, do you mean? No, I don't suppose it will prove to be them. It is probably a long cry from them to friends of Mr. Vyse's. Oh, Mrs. Honeychurch, the oddest people! The queerest people! For our part we liked them, didn't we?" He appealed to Lucy. "There was a great scene over some violets. They picked violets and filled all the vases in the room of these very Miss Alans who have failed to come to Cissie Villa..
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travel
violets
florence
italy
flowers
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E.M. Forster |
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313d5bf
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With the first jolt he was in daylight; they had left the gateways of King's Cross, and were under blue sky. Tunnels followed, and after each the sky grew bluer, and from the embankment at Finsbury Park he had his first sight of the sun. It rolled along behind the eastern smokes -- a wheel, whose fellow was the descending moon -- and as yet it seemed the servant of the blue sky, not its lord. He dozed again. Over Tewin Water it was day. To ..
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travel
blue
remorse
flowers
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E.M. Forster |
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aeab741
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But a lover is dogmatic. To him the world shall be beautiful and pure. When it is not, he ignores it.
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E.M. Forster |
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6baa95c
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You do admit that, if wealth was divided up equally, in a few years there would be rich and poor again just the same. The hard-working man would come to the top, the wastrel sink to the bottom. - Every one admits that.
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E.M. Forster |
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e155b39
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Indoors was his place and there he'd moulder, a respectable pillar of society who has never had the chance to misbehave.
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E.M. Forster |
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6a049ee
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Don't brood too much," she wrote to Helen, "on the superiority of the unseen to the seen. It's true, but to brood on it is medieval. Our business is not to contrast the two, but to reconcile them."
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E.M. Forster |
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42a9e94
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Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven. Century after century had he toiled, and here was his reward. Truly the garment had seemed heavenly at first, shot with colours of culture, sewn with the threads of self-denial. And heavenly it had been so l..
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E.M. Forster |
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ae465bd
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I'm always right. I'm quite uneasy at being always right so often.
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E.M. Forster |
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2fb5012
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Italy was offering her the most priceless of all possessions--her own soul.
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E.M. Forster |
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22e6278
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A rebel she was, but not of the kind he understood - a rebel who desired, not a wider dwelling-room, but equality beside the man she loved. For Italy was offering her the most priceless of all possessions - her own soul.
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E.M. Forster |
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a2ff0b5
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Looking back on the past six months, Margaret realized the chaotic nature of our daily life, and its difference from the orderly sequence that has been fabricated by historians. Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes. The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not t..
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E.M. Forster |
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12a78e4
|
The feudal ownership of land did bring dignity, whereas the modern ownership of movables is reducing us again to a nomadic horde. We are reverting to the civilisation of luggage, and historians of the future will note how the middle classes accreted possessions without taking root in the earth, and may find in this the secret of their imaginative poverty.
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E.M. Forster |
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107bb91
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It is not rubbish! It is the part of people that you do not understand.
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empathy
counseling
perspective
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E.M. Forster |
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f55912d
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The world is certainly full of beautiful things, if only I could come across them.
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E.M. Forster |
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ce8ac86
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Athletes, he believed, were simple, straightforward people, cruel and brutal if you like, but never petty. They knocked you down and hurt you, and then went on their way rejoicing.
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E.M. Forster |
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4d29f4f
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Your mistake is this, and it is a very common mistake. This young bounder has a life of his own. What right have you to conclude it is an unsuccessful life, or, as you call it, 'grey'?" "Because--" "One minute. You know nothing about him. He probably has his own joys and interests--wife, children, snug little home. That's where we practical fellows" he smiled--"are more tolerant than you intellectuals. We live and let live, and assume that ..
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E.M. Forster |
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1318c77
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If you introduce the human figure you at once arouse either disgust or desire.
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human-form
disgust
desire
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E.M. Forster |