A biography for E. M. Forsterhasn’t been written yet.
“The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In public affairs, in the rebuilding of civilization, something less dramatic and emotional is needed, namely tolerance.”
“No one is India.”
“Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.”
“Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return.”
“Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.”
“Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.”
“One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves.”
“Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration.”
“What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?”
“Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.”
“But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else.”
“Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!”
“No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour.”
“Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's.”
“One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.”
“So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.”
“Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards.”
“Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.”
“The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.”
“I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I'd like to be.”