E. M. Forster
E. M. Forster
Edward Morgan Forster OM CHwas an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. Forster's humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: "Only connect ... ". His 1908 novel, A Room with a View, is his most optimistic work, while A Passage to Indiabrought him his greatest success. He was...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth1 January 1879
There are moments when the inner life actually 'pays,' when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use.
An acquaintance had become a lover, might become a husband, but would retain all that she had noted in the acquaintance; and love must confirm an old relation rather than reveal a new one.
Though life is very glorious, it is difficult.
Outside the arch, always there seemed another arch. And beyond the remotest echo, a silence.
When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.
Was Mrs. Wilcox one of the unsatisfactory people- there are many of them- who dangle intimacy and then withdraw it? They evoke our interests and affections, and keep the life of the spirit dawdling around them. Then they withdraw. When physical passion is involved, there is a definite name for such behaviour- flirting- and if carried far enough, it is punishable by law. But no law- not public opinion, even- punishes those who coquette with friendship, though the dull ache that they inflict, the sense of misdirected effort and exhaustion, may be as intolerable. Was she one of these?
You told me once that we shall be judged by our intentions, not by our accomplishments. I thought it a grand remark. But we must intend to accomplish - not sit intending on a chair.
Let her go to Italy!" he cried. "Let her meddle with what she doesn't understand!
The present flowed by them like a stream. The tree rustled. It had made music before they were born, and would continue after their deaths, but its song was of the moment. The moment had passed. The tree rustled again. Their senses were sharpened, and they seemed to apprehend life. Life passed. The tree rustled again.
There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.
The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.
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 English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.
Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind.