A biography for E. M. Forsterhasn’t been written yet.
“People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness.”
“Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.”
“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.”
“The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.”
“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.”
“Ideas are fatal to caste.”
“There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.”
“Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.”
“I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man's pleasure when they come a cropper.”
“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.”
“I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.”
“Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.”
“I am certainly an ought and not a must.”
“If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.”
“We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.”
“I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.”
“What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.”
“The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.”
“At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.”
“One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.”