E. M. Forster

Who was E. M. Forster?

Edward Morgan Forster OM, CH was 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 India brought him his greatest success.

Famous Quotes:

• Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
• Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible.
• A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man.
• The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.
• America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for. It will probably be interesting, and it is sure to be large.
• Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due -- she reminds us too much of a prima donna.
• I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.
• Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.
• There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.
• Oxford is -- Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.