“If we lived for ever, what you say would be true. But we have to die, we have to leave life presently. Injustice and greed would be the real thing if we lived for ever. As it is, we must hold to other things, because Death is coming. I love death - not morbidly, but because He explains. He shows me the emptiness of Money. Death and Money are the eternal foes. Not Death and Life. . . . Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him. Behind the coffins and the skeletons that stay the vulgar mind lies something so immense that all that is great in us responds to it. Men of the world may recoil from the charnel-house that they will one day enter, but Love knows better. Death is his foe, but his peer, and in their age-long struggle the thews of Love have been strengthened, and his vision cleared, until there is no one who can stand against him.”

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Originally said in English.

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About E.M. Forster

English author

Edward Morgan Forster was an English author. He is known for his novels, including A Room with a View, Howards End and A Passage to India. He also wrote short stories, essays, speeches, broadcasts, biographies and pageant plays, and he co-authored the libretto for Benjamin Britten's opera Billy Budd. His fiction often looks at class differences and hypocrisy, and his humanist outlook is central to his work.

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