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
Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.
I am actually what my age and my upbringing have made me--a bourgeois who adheres to the British constitution, adheres to it rather than supports it, and the fact that this isn't dignified doesn't worry me.
A facade of skyscrapers facing a lake and behind the facade, every type of dubiousness.
Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties. You will have noticed in daily life that when people are inquisitive they nearly always have bad memories and are usually stupid at bottom.
The Germans are called brutal, the Spanish cruel, the Americans superficial, and so on; but we are perfide Albion, the island of hypocrites, the people who have built up an Empire with a Bible in one hand, a pistol in the other, and financial concessions in both pockets. Is the charge true? I think it is.
Lord I disbelieve - help thou my unbelief.
Solidity, caution, integrity, efficiency. Lack of imagination, hypocrisy. These qualities characterize the middle classes in everycountry, but in England they are national characteristics.
But the body is deeper than the soul and its secrets inscrutable.
English literature is a flying fish.
We may divide characters into flat and round.
The novelist, unlike many of his colleagues, makes up a number of word-masses roughly describing himself (roughly: niceties shallcome later), gives them names and sex, assigns them plausible gestures, and causes them to speak by the use of inverted commas, and perhaps to behave consistently.
How few writers can prostitute all their powers!
There are occasions when I would rather feel like a fly than a spider.
I have said that each aspect of the novel demands a different quality of the reader. Well, the prophetic aspect demands two qualities: humility and the suspension of the sense of humour.