E. M. Forster Quotes

346 quotes in 3860 categories

• Naked I came into the world, naked I shall go out of it! And a very good thing too, for it reminds me that I…
• It is not that the Englishman can't feel-it is that he is afraid to feel. He has been taught at his public school that feeling…
• Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. We move between two darkness's.
• Failure or success seems to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wriggling, of fighting with their star…
• The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death." "We must be willing to let go of the life we…
• As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take this…
• The idea that nations should love one another, or that business concerns or marketing boards should love one another, or that a man in Portugal…
• Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.
• Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull. The primitive audience was an audience of shock-heads, gaping around…
• A novelist can shift view-point if it comes off. ... Indeed, this power to expand and contract perception (of which the shifting view-point is a…
• This element of surprise or mystery - the detective element as it is sometimes rather emptily called - is of great importance in a plot.…
• The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises it is flat. Flat…
• Characters must not brood too long. They must not waste time running up and down ladders in their own insides.
• The historian records, but the novelist creates.
• A novel must give a sense of permanence as well as a sense of life.
• Suspense: the only literary tool that has any effect upon tyrants and savages.
• Chess is a forcing house where the fruits of character can ripen more fully than in life
• A facade of skyscrapers facing a lake and behind the facade, every type of dubiousness.
• It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more…
• Lord I disbelieve - help thou my unbelief.

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