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
We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
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.
. . . life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t'other from which . . .
Not only in sex, but in all things men have moved blindly, have evolved out of slime to dissolve into it when this accident of consequences is over.
For a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and - by some sad, strange irony - it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy.
Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.
Though life is very glorious, it is difficult.
All this fame and money, which have so thrilled me when they came to others, leave me cold when they come to me. I am not an ascetic, but I don't know what to do with them, and my daily life has never been so trying, and there is no one to fill it emotionally.
One has two duties - to be worried and not to be worried.
I love love I love being in love I don't care what it does to me The Format, in "Inches and Failing". Masood, a young lady has fallen in love with me-at least so I judge from her letters. Awkward is it not-awkward and surprising. You would be flattered and twirl your moustache, but I am merely uncomfortable. I wish she would stop, as she is very nice, and I enjoyed being friends. What an ill constructed world this is! Love is always being given where it is not required.
Excuse my mistakes, realize my limitations. Life is not easy as we know it on the earth.
Life - No, I've nothing to teach you about it for the moment. May be writing about it another week.
Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.