Literary Birthday – 1 January – E.M. Forster

E.M. Forster was born 1 January 1879, and died 7 June 1970.

Quotes

1. It isn’t possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.
2. 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 gone ourselves.
3. You confuse what’s important with what’s impressive.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
7. What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
8. Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time). It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West.
9. But Jane Austen is so different. She is my favourite author! I read and reread, the mouth open and the mind closed. Shut up in measureless content, I greet her by the name of most kind hostess, while criticism slumbers.
10. I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England’s.

E.M. Forster 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. His works include Howard’s End, A Room With a View, and A Passage to India.

Source for Image

by Amanda Patterson

Are you interested in more authors’ birthdays? Please click here: Literary Birthday Calendar