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 explained people, but could not understand them. After long centuries among the bones and muscles it might be advancing to knowledge of the nerves, but this would never give understanding
Some reviews give pain. This is regrettable, but no author has the right to whine. He was not obliged to be an author. He invited publicity, and he must take the publicity that comes along.
She only felt that the candle would burn better, the packing go easier, the world be happier, if she could give and receive some human love.
One can run away from women, turn them out, or give in to them. No fourth course.
Give, do not lend; after death who will thank you?
Tolerance is just a makeshift, suitable for an overcrowded and overheated planet. It carries on when love gives out, and love generally gives out as soon as we move away from our home and our friends.
A novel must give a sense of permanence as well as a sense of life.
Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate.
Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.
We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.
Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.
Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.
Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and of the recipient.
Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.