The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.
E. M. FORSTERIt’s not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
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Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.
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I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I’d like to be.
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Though life is very glorious, it is difficult.
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The historian records, but the novelist creates.
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It is so difficult – at least, I find it difficult – to understand people who speak the truth.
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We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
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My temple stands not upon Mount Moriah but in the Elysian Field where even the immoral are admitted. My motto is ‘Lord, I disbelieve – help thou my unbelief.
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Don’t begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed.
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A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
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Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work.
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It was pleasant to wake up in Florence, to open the eyes upon a bright bare room, with a floor of red tiles which look clean though they are not; with a painted ceiling whereon pink griffins and blue amorini sport in a forest of yellow violins and bassoons.
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One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.
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Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate.
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The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected.
E. M. FORSTER