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
There is much good luck in the world, but it is luck. We are none of us safe. We are children, playing or quarrelling on the line.
It so happened that Lucy, who found daily life rather chaotic, entered a more solid world when she opened the piano. She was then no longer either deferential or patronizing; no longer either a rebel or a slave.
When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.
There's enough sorrow in the world, isn't there, without trying to invent it.
She only felt that the candle would burn better, the packing go easier, the world be happier, if she could give and receive some human love.
Naked I came into the world, naked I shall go out of it! And a very good thing too, for it reminds me that I am naked under my shirt, whatever its colour.
Of course he despised the world as a whole; every thoughtful man should; it is almost a test of refinement.
School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible.
The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world.
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.