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Books have to be read it is the only way of discovering what they contain.
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
Assimilation
Contain
Discovering
Books
Read
Book
Way
More quotes by E. M. Forster
It's not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts.
E. M. Forster
The so called white races are really pinko-grey.
E. M. Forster
England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.
E. M. Forster
Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.
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
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
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
I am so used to seeing the sort of play which deals with one man and two women. They do not leave me with the feeling I have made a full theatrical meal they do not give me the experience of the multiplicity of life.
E. M. Forster
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
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
All invitations must proceed from heaven perhaps perhaps it is futile for men to initiate their own unity, they do but widen the gulfs between them by the attempt.
E. M. Forster
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
Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it.
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
I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.
E. M. Forster
I don't think literature will be purged until its philosophic pretentiousness is extruded, and I shant live to see that purge, nor perhaps when it has happened will anything survive.
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
Do not be proud of your inconsistency. It is a pity, it is a pity that we should be equipped like this. It is a pity that Man cannot be at the same time impressive and truthful.
E. M. Forster
Man can learn everything if he will but try.
E. M. Forster
Lord I disbelieve - help thou my unbelief.
E. M. Forster
