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. FORSTERFor it is a serious thing to have been watched. We all radiate something curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
E. M. FORSTER -
Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work.
E. M. FORSTER -
It isn’t possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.
E. M. FORSTER -
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
E. M. FORSTER -
There’s never any great risk as long as you have money.
E. M. FORSTER -
School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible.
E. M. FORSTER -
Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.
E. M. FORSTER -
It is easy to sympathize at a distance,’ said an old gentleman with a beard. ‘I value more the kind word that is spoken close to my ear.
E. M. FORSTER -
Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.
E. M. FORSTER -
I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man’s pleasure when they come a cropper.
E. M. FORSTER -
We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
E. M. FORSTER -
There are moments when the inner life actually ‘pays,’ when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use.
E. M. FORSTER -
One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
E. M. FORSTER -
I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.
E. M. FORSTER -
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.
E. M. FORSTER