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
The woman who can't influence her husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herself.
The people I admire most are those who are sensitive and want to create something or discover something, and do not see life in terms of power.
You want to love everyone equally, and that's worse than impossible--it's wrong.
We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.
Ah, but you see, I didn't want to be fair.
Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate.
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.
We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.
Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.
Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.
Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and of the recipient.
Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.
Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return.