E. M. Forster Quotes About Literature
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It is now only in letters I write what I feel: not in literature any more, and I seldom say it, because I keep trying to be amusing.
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The sort of poetry I seek only resides in objects Man can't touch - like England 's grass network of lanes 100 years ago, but today he can destroy them and only Lord Farrer keeps him from doing it.
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Just as words have two functions - information and creation - so each human mind has two personalities, one on the surface, one deeper down. The upper personality... is conscious and alert... The lower personality is a... perfect fool, but without it there is no literature.
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It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness.
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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.
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The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.
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Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.
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Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.
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History develops, art stands still.
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We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.
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The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.
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Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration.
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Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence.
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The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.
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What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?
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Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!
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Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
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Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.
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We may divide characters into flat and round.
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Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.
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So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.
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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.
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English literature is a flying fish.
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There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.
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The woman who can't influence her husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herself.
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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.
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Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's.
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Reverence is fatal to literature.
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One's favorite book is as elusive as one's favorite pudding.
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Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
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