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It is devilish difficult to criticise society & also create human beings.

E. M. Forster

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E. M. Forster
Age: 91 †
Born: 1879
Born: January 1
Died: 1970
Died: June 7
Biographer
Essayist
Librettist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
London
England
Edward Morgan Forster
E Forster
EM Forster
Society
Difficult
Also
Character
Human
Devilish
Humans
Criticise
Beings
Create

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Do you suppose there's any difference between spring in nature and spring in man? But there we go, praising the one and condemning the other as improper, ashamed that the same laws work eternally through both.
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The present flowed by them like a stream. The tree rustled. It had made music before they were born, and would continue after their deaths, but its song was of the moment. The moment had passed. The tree rustled again. Their senses were sharpened, and they seemed to apprehend life. Life passed. The tree rustled again.
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I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place.
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If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.
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I don't know what to think until I see what I've said.
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But I have seen my obstacles: trivialities, learning and poetry. This last needs explaining: the old artist's readiness to dissolve characters into a haze. Characters cannot come alive and fight and guide the world unless the novelist wants them to remain characters.
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I am an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort.
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I do not believe in Belief.
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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.
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Are not beauty and delicacy the same?
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One grows accustomed to being praised, or being blamed, or being advised, but it is unusual to be understood.
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. . . life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t'other from which . . .
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Solidity, caution, integrity, efficiency. Lack of imagination, hypocrisy. These qualities characterize the middle classes in everycountry, but in England they are national characteristics.
E. M. Forster
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England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.
E. M. Forster
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[...] it is right to be kind and even sacrifice ourselves to people who need kindness and lie in our way - otherwise, besides failing to help them, we run into the aridity of self-development. To seek for recipients of one's goodness, to play the Potted Jesus leads to the contray the Christian danger.
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Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.
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A novel must give a sense of permanence as well as a sense of life.
E. M. Forster
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There is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.
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Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.
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The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.
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