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
E. M. Forster quotes about
... there are shadows because there are hills.
It's not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts.
It comes to this then: there always have been people like me and always will be, and generally they have been persecuted.
One doesn't come to Italy for niceness," was the retort; "one comes for life. Buon giorno! Buon giorno!
The crime of suicide lies rather in its disregard for the feelings of those whom we leave behind.
To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it.
I'd far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children.
I am an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort.
Why children?' he asked. 'Why always children? For love to end where it begins is far more beautiful, and Nature knows it.
It's miles worse for you than that; I'm in love with your gamekeeper.
The advance of regret can be so gradual that it is impossible to say "yesterday I was happy, today I am not.
I think - I think - I think how little they think what lies so near them.
It is impossible to foretell the future with any degree of accuracy, that it is impossible to rehearse life. A fault in the scenery, a face in the audience, an interruption of the audience on to the stage, and all our carefully planned gesture mean nothing, or mean too much.
He built up a situation that was far enough from the truth. It never occurred to him that Helen was to blame. He forgot the intensity of their talk, the charm that had been lent him by sincerity, the magic of Oniton under darkness and of the whispering river. Helen loved the absolute. Leonard had been ruined absolutely, and had appeared to her as a man apart, isolated from the world. A real man, who cared for adventure and beauty, who desired to live decently and pay his way, who could have travelled more gloriously through life than the Juggernaut car that was crushing him.