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Quote by E.M. Forster

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Maurice

Set in the late 19th century, the story follows the protagonist's journey as he navigates complex relationships and societal expectations. more

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E.M. Forster

Browse famous quotes and profile details for E.M. Forster. more

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“Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament—the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana—is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea. The same applies to the seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on the Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is circulated. No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was positively expected to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied. It's not a coincidence that Omar Khayyam, rebuking and ridiculing the stone-faced Iranian mullahs of his time, pointed to the value of the grape as a mockery of their joyless and sterile regime. Visiting today's Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn't particularly take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great brio and ingenuity. These small revolutions affirm the human.”

WritingInspirationReligionReadingChristianityAtheismFoodWineAlcoholBoredomIranBrotherhoodPlatoMiraclesNew TestamentOxfordMullahsAncient GreeksHellenismPassoverOmar KhayyamPassover SederCanaEntheosJudaeaMarriage At CanaSymposia
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“In this connection, I should like to say something that I have found in many other writers: Intellectual alienation is a creation of middle-class society. What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.”

Middle Class
Book:Black Skin, White Masks
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“Piri Thomas' book Down These Mean Streets followed me around for years, in the corner of my eye on bus terminal bookracks. Finally, in a gritted teeth desperation I faced the damn thing and said "OK, tell me." I sweated my way through it in two nights: Gang fights, knifings, robberies, smack, prison. It's the standard Puerto Rican street story, except he lived. The junkies could be my younger brothers. The prisoners could be them. I could be the prostitute, the welfare mother, the sister and lover of junkies, the child of alcoholics. There is nothing but circumstance and good English, nothing but my mother marrying into the middle class, between me and that life.”

Middle ClassPuerto Rican
Author:Aurora Levins Morales
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“He was born in a middle class family with struggles in life. He had adverse surroundings and many difficulties in his life. Some moments haunted him - he would remember a few things that did not happen in his life as he thought they would, and he would feel a deep pain of past regrets shatter his calmness. One day he realized that he desperately needed someone to whom he could share everything and someone who could guide him in life. He found me. And I became his Guru.”

LifePhilosophyWisdomMiddle ClassGuruRegretsStrugglesTeaching QuotesChasing Dreams
Author:Avijeet Das
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“I have been back among fairy tales,” she says. “I do not quite understand, Alesha. Those gallant little boys! They are youth, and youth is always full of strangeness. Mr. Heritage! He is youth, too, and poetry, perhaps, and a soldier’s tradition. I think I know him... But what about Dickson? He is the petit bourgeois, the épicier, the class which the world ridicules. He is unbelievable. “No,” is the answer. “You will not find him in Russia. He is what they call the middle-class, which we who were foolish used to laugh at. But he is the stuff which aboveall others makes a great people. He will endure when aristocracies crack and proletariats crumble. In our own land we have never known him, but till we create him our land will not be a nation.”

Middle Class
Book:Huntingtower
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