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
Only connect!...Only connect the prose and the passion.
For you cannot have gentility without paying for it.
But after all, what have we to do with taverns? Real menace belongs to the drawing-room.
I distrust great men.... I believe in aristocracy, though. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet.... They are sensitive for others as well as for themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to endure and they can take a joke.
Solidity, caution, integrity, efficiency. Lack of imagination, hypocrisy. These qualities characterize the middle classes in everycountry, but in England they are national characteristics.
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.
One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves.
At the side of the everlasting why, is a yes, and a yes, and a yes.
Two cheers for Democracy; one because it admits variety, and two because it permits criticism.
We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.
Human beings have their great chance in the novel.
Science explained people, but could not understand them. After long centuries among the bones and muscles it might be advancing to knowledge of the nerves, but this would never give understanding
Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.