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I have said that each aspect of the novel demands a different quality of the reader. Well, the prophetic aspect demands two qualities: humility and the suspension of the sense of humour.
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
Wells
Humility
Well
Aspect
Suspension
Different
Demand
Prophetic
Reader
Apathy
Novel
Humour
Quality
Demands
Sense
Qualities
Two
Empathy
More quotes by E. M. Forster
As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take the examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one be a penny the stupider.
E. M. Forster
Romance only dies with life. No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of us. But there is a spurious sentiment which cannot resist the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque. A touch will loosen it, and the sooner it goes from us the better.
E. M. Forster
One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.
E. M. Forster
The book [ A Passage to India ] shows signs of fatigue and disillusionment but it has chapters of clear and triumphant beauty, and above all it makes us wonder, what will he write next?
E. M. Forster
I am actually what my age and my upbringing have made me - a bourgeois who adheres to the British constitution, adheres to it rather than supports it, and the fact that this isn't dignified doesn't worry me.
E. M. Forster
The present flowed by them like a stream. The tree rustled. It had made music before they were born, and would continue after their deaths, but its song was of the moment. The moment had passed. The tree rustled again. Their senses were sharpened, and they seemed to apprehend life. Life passed. The tree rustled again.
E. M. Forster
No one is more triumphant than the man who chooses a worthy subject and masters all its facts.
E. M. Forster
While her lips talked culture, her heart was planning to invite him to tea
E. M. Forster
Tolerance is just a makeshift, suitable for an overcrowded and overheated planet. It carries on when love gives out, and love generally gives out as soon as we move away from our home and our friends.
E. M. Forster
Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate.
E. M. Forster
I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place.
E. M. Forster
It is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.
E. M. Forster
In the creative state a man is taken out of himself.
E. M. Forster
Don't be mysterious there isn't the time.
E. M. Forster
Love felt and returned, love which our bodies exact and our hearts have transfigured, love which is the most real thing that we shall ever meet, reappeared now as the world's enemy, and she must stifle it.
E. M. Forster
Self-pity? I see no moral objections to it, the smell drives people away, but that's a practical objection, and occasionally an advantage.
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 lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.
E. M. Forster
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
The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.
E. M. Forster
