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
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.
Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.
Unless we remember we cannot understand.
I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place.
It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.
I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man's pleasure when they come a cropper.