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
Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: You can't deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.
Cesare PaveseRead
What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully.
V. S. NaipaulRead
I'll read anything Anne Carson writes, anything J. M. Coetzee writes, and anything Cormac McCarthy writes. I'll drop whatever I'm doing to read a new Mary Ruefle essay.
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Next to doing things that deserve to be written, nothing gets a man more credit, or gives him more pleasure than to write things that deserve to be read.
Lord ChesterfieldRead
I cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends. ... Of course, it rarely ends that way.
Kazuo IshiguroRead
In the century-long history of Chinese science fiction, apocalyptic themes were mostly absent. This was especially true in the period before the 1990s, when Chinese science fiction, isolated from the influence of the West, developed on its own.
Liu CixinRead