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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
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E. M. Forster
Age: 91 †
Born: 1879
Born: January 1
Died: 1970
Died: June 7
Biographer
Essayist
Librettist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
London
England
Edward Morgan Forster
E Forster
EM Forster
Reading
Transforms
Great
Reads
Men
Condition
Wrote
Towards
Conditions
Wonderful
Literature
More quotes by E. M. Forster
They had nothing in common but the English language.
E. M. Forster
England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature--for the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still, for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk.
E. M. Forster
But I have seen my obstacles: trivialities, learning and poetry. This last needs explaining: the old artist's readiness to dissolve characters into a haze. Characters cannot come alive and fight and guide the world unless the novelist wants them to remain characters.
E. M. Forster
It is the starved imagination, not the well nourished, that is afraid.
E. M. Forster
This solitude opressed her she was accustomed to have her thoughts confirmed by others or, at all events, contradicted it was too dreadful not to know whether she was thinking right or wrong.
E. M. Forster
To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge the poor cannot afford it.
E. M. Forster
If only the sense of actuality can be lulled-and it sleeps for ever in most historians-there is no passion that cannot be gratified in the past.
E. M. Forster
I'd far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children.
E. M. Forster
Of course he despised the world as a whole every thoughtful man should it is almost a test of refinement.
E. M. Forster
Chess is a forcing house where the fruits of character can ripen more fully than in life
E. M. Forster
Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due - she reminds us too much of a prima donna.
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
Aziz winked at him slowly and said: “...There are many ways of being a man mine is to express what is deepest in my heart.
E. M. Forster
English literature is a flying fish.
E. M. Forster
The Germans are called brutal, the Spanish cruel, the Americans superficial, and so on but we are perfide Albion, the island of hypocrites, the people who have built up an Empire with a Bible in one hand, a pistol in the other, and financial concessions in both pockets. Is the charge true? I think it is.
E. M. Forster
I do like Christmas on the whole.... In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But it is clumsier every year.
E. M. Forster
We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.
E. M. Forster
I don't know what to think until I see what I've said.
E. M. Forster
Some reviews give pain. This is regrettable, but no author has the right to whine. He was not obliged to be an author. He invited publicity, and he must take the publicity that comes along.
E. M. Forster
It makes a difference doesn't it, whether we fully fence ourselves in, or whether we are fenced out by the barriers of others?
E. M. Forster