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
I cannot help thinking that there is something to admire in everyone, even if you do not approve of them.
There is fascism , leading only into the blackness which it has chosen as its symbol, into smartness and yapping out of orders,and self-righteous brutality, into social as well as international war. It means change without hope. Our immediate duty- in that tinkering which is the only useful form of action in our leaky old tub-our immediate duty is to stop it.
At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
There is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.
How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.
One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's own emotions.
Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another.
Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.
Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's.
Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
At the moment they vanished they were everywhere, the cool benediction of the night descended, the stars sparkled, and the whole universe was a hill.
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.