Personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever, and not this outer life of telegrams and anger.
E. M. ForsterRead
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Great literature changes readers, aligning them more closely with the experiences and insights of its authors.
E. M. Forster's quote highlights the transformative power of literature, suggesting that when one engages deeply with literary works, they undergo a change that brings them closer to the author's perspective and understanding of the world. This exchange enriches the reader's own life and thoughts, making literature an essential part of personal and intellectual growth.
Themes
LiteratureTransformationReadingUnderstandingGrowth
In practice
Example use cases
During a book club discussion, one might say: 'As E. M. Forster pointed out, great literature transforms us, enabling deeper empathy.'
More from E. M. Forster
All quotes βA poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
E. M. ForsterRead
One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
E. M. ForsterRead
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.
E. M. ForsterRead
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.
E. M. ForsterRead
One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.
E. M. ForsterRead
Similar quotes
If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
I'm aware that many of my friends will be saddened and shocked, or shock-saddened, over some of the chapters in 'The Catcher In the Rye.' Some of my best friends are children. In fact, all my best friends are children. It's almost unbearable for me to realize that my book will be kept on a shelf out of their reach.
J. D. SalingerRead
In a word, literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. The things I have learned and the things I have been taught seem of ridiculously little importance compared with their "large loves and heavenly charities.
Helen KellerRead
A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen.
Charles BaxterRead
All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.
John BanvilleRead
Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.
P. D. JamesRead