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
I'm a holy man minus the holiness. Hand that on to your three spies, and tell them to put it in their pipes.
...the true spirit of gastronomic joylessness. Porridge fills the Englishman up, and prunes clear him out.
But why I cry out against Rubens is because he painted undressed people instead of naked ones.
Without form, the sensitiveness vanishes.
English literature is a flying fish.
Solidity, caution, integrity, efficiency. Lack of imagination, hypocrisy. These qualities characterize the middle classes in everycountry, but in England they are national characteristics.
One's favorite book is as elusive as one's favorite pudding.
The Germans are called brutal, the Spanish cruel, the Americans superficial, and so on; but we are perfide Albion, the island of hypocrites, the people who have built up an Empire with a Bible in one hand, a pistol in the other, and financial concessions in both pockets. Is the charge true? I think it is.
God is not Love in the East. He is Power, although Mercy may temper it.
There are occasions when I would rather feel like a fly than a spider.
You want to love everyone equally, and that's worse than impossible--it's wrong.
I am actually what my age and my upbringing have made me--a bourgeois who adheres to the British constitution, adheres to it rather than supports it, and the fact that this isn't dignified doesn't worry me.
I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's.
I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.