“An efficiency-regime cannot be run without a few heroes stuck about it to carry off the dullness — much as plums have to be put into bad pudding to make it palatable.”

— E.M. Forster

What I Believe (1938)

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E.M. Forster 200

English novelist 1879–1970

Charles Frazier book Thirteen Moons

Source: Thirteen Moons

“True, there are some great passages in Revelation, but the book on the whole is like boarding-school plum pudding, where the plums are scarce and far apart.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.192

“I have bad car juju."
-Stephanie Plum”

Janet Evanovich book Plum Spooky

Source: Plum Spooky

“I remember once quarreling with Yeats who was walking around the room with a sword in one hand muttering spells to ward off evil spirits, and I noticed that every time he passed a plate of plums he put down his unoccupied hand and took a plum and I said, "Yeats, you cannot evoke great spirits and eat plums at the same time."”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

As quoted in Across My Path (1952) by Pelham Edgar, p. 148

“Too bad, Elizabeth. You're Stuck with me. Not for a few decades, not for centuries. You're tied to me forever. That boy and girl offspring you talked off? They'll come from me--or no one.”

Kresley Cole American writer

Source: Lothaire

“Life's a pudding full of plums;
Care's a canker that benumbs,
Wherefore waste our elocution
On impossible solution?
Life's a pleasant institution,
Let us take it as it comes!”

W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) English librettist of the Gilbert & Sullivan duo

The tangled Skein.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“It is not him, not the bold enemy
That rushes fiercely on the healthful breast.
For such I have no fear. ’Tis this dull jail
That makes the hero and the coward one!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Translations, From the German

“You cannot be a hero without being a coward.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Preface http://books.google.com/books?id=u4xiAAAAMAAJ&q=%22You+cannot+be+a+hero+without+being+a+coward%22&pg=PR13#v=onepage
1900s, John Bull's Other Island (1907)

“In wartime a man is called a hero. It doesn't make him any braver, and he runs for his life. But at least it's a hero who is running away.”

Jean Giraudoux The Trojan War Will Not Take Place

Tiger at the Gates (1935)

“I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake.”

Mary McCarthy (1912–1989) American writer

Commenting on her novel The Group. New York Herald Tribune (5 January 1964)

“An efficiency-regime cannot be run without a few heroes stuck about it to carry off the dullness — much as plums have to be put into bad pudding to make it palatable.”

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E.M. Forster 200

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