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
The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In public affairs, in the rebuilding of civilization, something less dramatic and emotional is needed, namely tolerance.
Don't go fighting against the Spring.
Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.
One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves.
You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.
Words deserted him immediately. He could only speak when he was not asked to.
Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden. It is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.
Expansion, that is the idea the novelist must cling to, not completion, not rounding off, but opening out.
Axiom : Novel must have either one living character or a perfect pattern: fails otherwise.
The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.
The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.
Books have to be read it is the only way of discovering what they contain.
The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world.
Aziz winked at him slowly and said: “...There are many ways of being a man; mine is to express what is deepest in my heart.