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
Human relations are impossible. When they are real they are uncomfortable, and when they are comfortable they are unreal. It was for the journey into solitude that the human soul was created.
He doesn't want you to be real, and to think and to live. He doesn't love you. But I love you. I want you to have your own thoughts and ideas and feelings, even when I hold you in my arms.
Personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever, and not this outer life of telegrams and anger.
Happiness in the ordinary sense is not what one needs in life, though one is right to aim at it. The true satisfaction is to come through, and see those whom one lives come through.
The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken.
Are not beauty and delicacy the same?
America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for It will probably be interesting, and it is sure to be large.
An efficiency-regime cannot be run without a few heroes stuck about it to carry off the dullness -- much as plums have to be put into bad pudding to make it palatable.
Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.
In the creative state a man is taken out of himself.
Only connect!...Only connect the prose and the passion.
I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I'd like to be.
Ideas are fatal to caste.
It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools.