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Author's popularity: -2
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Popularity: 1
Vote: | A facade of skyscrapers facing a lake and behind the facade, every type of dubiousness. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take this examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one would be a penny the stupider. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | How can I know what I think till I see what I say? |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I am so used to seeing the sort of play which deals with one man and two women. They do not leave me with the feeling I have made a full theatrical meal they do not give me the experience of the multiplicity of life. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man's pleasure when they come a cropper. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I have been racking my brains and can find no reply to this very reasonable question. I can only suggest that the fictional part of me dried up. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I'd like to be. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | 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 gone ourselves. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | It is the one orderly product our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths; it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden the best evidence we can give of our dignity. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Nonsense and beauty have close connections. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | They go forth with well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds and undeveloped hearts. An undeveloped heart-not a cold one. The difference is important. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | This opera is my Nunc Dimittis, in that it dismisses me peacefully and convinces me I have achieved. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Unless we remember we cannot understand. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Where there is officialism every human relationship suffers. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Yes, oh dear, yes, the novel tells a story. |
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Biography
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Edward Morgan Forster (January 1, 1879 - June 7, 1970) was an English novelist.
Born in London, the son of an architect, he was to have been named Henry, but was baptised Edward by accident. Forster attended Tonbridge School in Kent. At King's College, Cambridge in 1901, he became involved with a group known as the Cambridge Conversazione Society (aka The Cambridge Apostles). Many of its members went on to form the Bloomsbury group, of which Forster was also a member. Forster also belonged to an informal group of gay intellectuals which included Siegfried Sassoon, J. R. Ackerley and Forrest Reid. He travelled in Egypt, Germany and India with classicist G.L. Dickinson in 1914. He died in Coventry where he wished to spend his last moments.
Many of his novels have been filmed by Ismail Merchant and James Ivory.
Overview Secular humanism
Forster's views as a secular humanist are at the heart of his work, which often features characters attempting to understand each other ('only connect...', in the words of Forster's famous epigraph to Howards End) across social barriers. In Howards End, for example, the central relationship, unacceptable to some of Forster's contemporary readers, is between working-class Leonard Bast and upper-middle-class Helen Schlegel.
In A Passage to India, the main barrier is one of race, a triangle of mistrust between the British and their Muslim and Hindu subjects. A young Indian, Dr. Aziz, is accused of raping a white British girl, Adela Quested, on a tour of a local cave; the accusation appears to be false, although what actually happened in the cave is never revealed to the reader. The incident convinces him of the impossibility of friendship between Indians and the British, and damages his friendship with Fielding, a liberal-minded Englishman. Forster's goal seems to be to show that all humans are of one race, that the barriers between them are artificial, but also, pessimistically, that even if we can 'connect' emotionally, our relationships are often doomed to fail because of social pressure. Finally, in Maurice (see below), Forster addressed the subject of homosexual love.
Sexuality
The role of sex in Forster's writing can perhaps be most succinctly characterized as progressing from heterosexual love to homosexual love. Supposedly this was all started when Edward Carpenter and his lover George Merrill paid him a visit when he was 35. A particularly sensual touch by Carpenter on his back, as he later recalled, drove him to start working on Maurice, which he repeatedly rewrote later on. The two protagonists of that novel, Maurice and Alec, seem to some degree be modelled after Carpenter and Merrill, reflecting in particular their class difference, which Forster (just as so many other gay poets and authors of the time) perceived as liberating and an escape from the confinements of middle-class morals.
While gay subtexts are more hidden in A Passage to India, the title of this work gives away its origin in the Walt Whitman poem Passage to India, which is about male comradeship. Carpenter was again the medium by which this influence reached Forster.
After A Passage to India, Forster proclaimed he was unable to do any more stories in "their" way (that is, the way of heterosexuals). Forster wrote: "I shall never write another novel after [Passage], my patience with ordinary people has given out." He turned to writing short stories, often with gay themes. Maurice, in circulation only between his closest friends at his lifetime, was finally published posthumously, even though gay liberation had progressed considerably during the late 1960s and early 1970s, making the extreme caution seem somewhat strange. While Maurice may be in some ways relatively dated (for example, in Scudder's panic reaction after their first night spent together to try to extort money from Maurice), and was also considered obsolete by the author in his Terminal Note to Maurice, it still is appealing today for its emotional frankness, warm humor, and romantic (if somewhat unrealistic) ending.
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "E. M. Forster".
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