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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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Donna Grant

"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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Donna Grant

"Other people's stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on."

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Donna Grant

"Every person's story contains chapters of pain and loss, victory and defeat, love and hate, pride and prejudice, courage and fear, faith and self-distrust, charity and kindness, selfishness and jealously. Every person's story also contains folios of hopefulness and truthfulness, deceit and despair, action and change, passion and compassion, excitement and boredom, birth and creation, mutation and defect, generation and preservation, delusions and illusions, imagination and fantasy, bafflement and puzzlement. What makes a person's selfsame story unique is how he or she organizes the pure and impure forces that comprise them, how they respond to internal and external crisis, if they act in a safeguarding and humble manner, or lead a self-seeking and destructive existence."

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Donna Grant

"It's entirely possible to base an entire book on a long-forgotten letter."

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Donna Grant

"It is the tale, not he who tells it."

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Donna Grant

"Like it or not... that's my story and I can't do that or that each action by itself is a limitation."

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Donna Grant

"Without archives many stories of real people would be lost, and along with those stories, vital clues that allow us to reflect and interpret our lives today."

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Donna Grant

"Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place."

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Donna Grant

"Life is a great Book. We are writing the history of our time."

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Donna Grant

"Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open - the only way to stop the story from running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants."

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E. M. Forster
"Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due - she reminds us too much of a prima donna."
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E. M. Forster
"A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself."
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E. M. Forster
"Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind."
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E. M. Forster
"Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable."
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E. M. Forster
"Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another."
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E. M. Forster
"Two cheers for Democracy; one because it admits variety, and two because it permits criticism."
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E. M. Forster
"The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race."
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E. M. Forster
"I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual."
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E. M. Forster
"Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch."
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E. M. Forster
"One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's own emotions."
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