Quote

Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and of the recipient.

E. M. Forster

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Personality
Writer
Two
Classed
Must
Recipient
Good
Tests
Express
Letters
Pass

More quotes by E. M. Forster

Image
One grows accustomed to being praised, or being blamed, or being advised, but it is unusual to be understood.
E. M. Forster
Image
If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
E. M. Forster
Image
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
Image
The historian records, but the novelist creates.
E. M. Forster
Image
No one is more triumphant than the man who chooses a worthy subject and masters all its facts.
E. M. Forster
Image
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
Image
It's not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts.
E. M. Forster
Image
The so called white races are really pinko-grey.
E. M. Forster
Image
Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. We move between two darkness's.
E. M. Forster
Image
What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?
E. M. Forster
Image
She only felt that the candle would burn better, the packing go easier, the world be happier, if she could give and receive some human love.
E. M. Forster
Image
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
Image
They cared for no one, they were outside humanity, and death, had it come, would only have continued their pursuit of a retreating horizon.
E. M. Forster
Image
The traveller who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or the corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it.
E. M. Forster
Image
The woman who can't influence her husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herself.
E. M. Forster
Image
I don't know what to think until I see what I've said.
E. M. Forster
Image
What the world most needs today are negative virtues - not minding people, not being huffy, touchy, irritable or revengeful.
E. M. Forster
Image
The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.
E. M. Forster
Image
Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand.
E. M. Forster
Image
Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time). It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West.
E. M. Forster