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E. M. Forster

"The novelist defines the story with the following example: If you are told that the king died and then the queen died, that is a sequence of events. If you were told that the king died and then the queen died of grief, that is a story that he was interested."

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"The novelist defines the story with the following example: If you are told that the king died and then the queen died, that is a sequence of events. If you were told that the king died and then the queen died of grief, that is a story that he was interested."

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Amber Hurdle

"People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around."

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Amber Hurdle

"Each affects the other, and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one."

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Amber Hurdle

"Borges said there are only four stories to tell: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power and the voyage. All of us writers rewrite these same stories ad infinitum."

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Amber Hurdle

"My life is my book, but I can't read it."

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Amber Hurdle

"There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before."

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Amber Hurdle

"Maybe our telling of the story wasn't as clear as it should have been, but I don't think that's true. In terms of understanding the story, it comes across."

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Amber Hurdle

"The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in."

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Amber Hurdle

"We're all strangers connected by what we reveal, what we share, what we take away--our stories. I guess that's what I love about books--they are thin strands of humanity that tether us to one another for a small bit of time, that make us feel less alone or even more comfortable with our aloneness, if need be."

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Amber Hurdle

"In the room...they are inside the books. They move sometimes within the pages, like sleepers turning over between two dreams."

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Amber Hurdle

"All Bette's stories have happy endings. That's because she knows where to stop.She's realized the real problem with stories - if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death."

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E. M. Forster
"Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off, but opening out."
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"We may say that History develops, Art stands still."
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E. M. Forster
"I think everyone fails, but there are so many kinds of failure."
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"It is not difficult to stand above the conventions when we leave no hostages among them; men can always be more unconventional than women, and a bachelor of independent means need encounter no difficulties at all."
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E. M. Forster
"Too late... everything's always too late."
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E. M. Forster
"People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness."
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E. M. Forster
"Mr. Pembroke, watching his broad back, desired to bury a knife in it. The desire passed, partly because it was unclerical, partly because he had no knife, and partly because he soon blurred over what had happened. To him all criticism was "rudeness": he never heeded it, for he never needed it: he was never wrong."
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E. M. Forster
"Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety."
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"I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's."
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E. M. Forster
"Ideas are fatal to caste."
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