Short Story Writers From England

"D'you call life a bad job? Never! We've had our ups and downs, we've had our struggles, we've always been poor, but it's been worth it, ay, worth it a hundred times I say when I look round at my children."

"The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore."

"He was always seeking for a meaning in life, and here it seemed to him that a meaning was offered; but it was obscure and vague. He was profoundly troubled. He saw what looked like the truth as by flashes of lightning on a dark, stormy night you might see a mountain range. He seemed to see that a man need not leave his life to chance, but that his will was powerful; he seemed to see that self-control might be as passionate and as active as the surrender to passion; he seemed to see that the inward life might be as manifold, as varied, as rich with experience, as the life of one who conquered realms and explored unknown lands."

"It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic."

"There's always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved."

"But when all was said the important thing was to love rather than to be loved."

"It's no use crying over spilt milk, because all of the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it."

"When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me."

"Life wouldn't be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present. When things are at their worst I find something always happens."

"Of course it was cause and effect, but in the necessity with which follows the other lay all tragedy of life."

"There was an immeasurable distance between the quick and the dead: they did not seem to belong to the same species; and it was strange to think that but a little while before they had spoken and moved and eaten and laughed."

"Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner."

"I daresay one profits more by the mistakes one makes off one's own bat than by doing the right thing on somebody's else advice."

"It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it is too late."

"You will hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. They do not know how mean it makes you. It exposes you to endless humiliation, it cuts your wings, it eats into your soul like a cancer. It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank, and independent."

"There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one's means of livelihood...Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five."

"People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise."

"Men seek but one thing in life — their pleasure."

"I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the centre of the world."

"Art... is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life."

"Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind."

"It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded."

"You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action."

"He had doubts about the utility of examination on subjects which had been crammed for the occasion. He wanted common sense."

"Observing these people I am no longer surprised that there is such a scarcity of domestic servants back home."

"I hate people who play bridge as though they were at a funeral and knew their feet were getting wet."

"A soul is a troublesome possession, and when man developed it he lost the Garden of Eden."

"My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror."

"Money is the string with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets."

"To eat well in England, you should have a breakfast three times a day."

"Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it."

"What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably... have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature."

"So last January, with the beginning of a snowstorm in the air about me—and if it settled on me it would betray me!—weary, cold, painful, inexpressibly wretched, and still but half convinced of my invisible quality, I began this new life to which I am committed. I had no refuge, no appliances, no human being in the world in whom I could confide. To have told my secret would have given me away—made a mere show and rarity of me. Nevertheless, I was half-minded to accost some passer-by and throw myself upon his mercy. But I knew too clearly the terror and brutal cruelty my advances would evoke. I made no plans in the street. My sole object was to get shelter from the snow, to get myself covered and warm; then I might hope to plan. But even to me, an Invisible Man, the rows of London houses stood latched, barred, and bolted impregnably."

"The middle age of buggers is not to be contemplated without horror."

"The book [A Passage to India] shows signs of fatigue and disillusionment; but it has chapters of clear and triumphant beauty, and above all it makes us wonder, what will he write next?"

"Mr E. M. Forster, particularly in the first half of Pharos and Pharillon, set a model of lucidity and individuality in which the elegance is so unobtrusive as to pass some readers unnoticed."

"Forster wrote the five books on which his reputation rests because he desperately needed to create characters and situations that would expose his own plight in ways that were subtle and dramatic without being obvious or explicit. His true nature was not only homosexual, it was also wounded, mysterious and filled with sympathy for others, including foreigners and women. Despite his best intentions, he allowed all of himself into the five novels published in his lifetime, and only part of himself into “Maurice"."

"He's a mediocre man — and knows it, or suspects it, which is worse; he will come to no good, and in the meantime he's treated rudely by waiters and is not really admired even by middle-class dowagers."

"Forster took a risk, opening the comic novel to let in the things it was not designed for; small patches of purple prose were the result. But Forster's innovation remains: he allowed the English comic novel the possibility of a spiritual and bodily life, not simply to exist as an exquisitely worked game of social ethics but as a messy human concoction. He expanded the comic novel's ethical space (while unbalancing its moral certainties) simply by letting more of life in. Austen asks for toleration from her readers. Forster demands something far stickier, more shameful: love."

"He Anthony Blunt] reminded me of E. M. Forster's famous statement that if he had to choose between betraying his country or betraying his friend, he hoped he would have the courage to betray his country. I said that in the appalling political circumstances under which we lived, to betray one's country might mean betraying innumerable other friends and it might also mean betraying one's wife and one's family. I said Forster's antithesis was a false one. One's country was not some abstract conception which it might be relatively easy to sacrifice for the sake of an individual; it was itself made up of a dense network of individual and social relationships in which loyalty to one particular person formed only a single strand."

"For the Wilcoxes are England; they contain more of the essence of England even than Sunday afternoons, or Lords, or Sir William Bull."

"Forster...perceived, and, as far as it can be done at all, described, that sense of hallucination which pervades India. "Nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else." As I once heard it remarked of the rope-trick, "it is essentially Indian, because no such trick ever existed". The English in India, for all their doing and striving, became part of that hallucination. The Raj itself (without intending the pun) was a mirage; a dream which British and Indians dreamed together and which individuals will still dream again when they meet, long, long after other dreams and other hallucinations have succeeded. Leave out Forster's pasteboard figures of fun, and his physical descriptions of scenes and cities evoke the dream as they only could if someone who also felt it had written them."

"She thinks the one place where you can transcend your own tribalism, and daily politics, is through the novel. Just so long, she says, as it avoids preachiness. She cites A Passage to India, one of her favourite books. "It's a political novel and the politics are dead and obsolete; and yet the book goes on and on. And because it's a political book it has a tremendous moral and didactic message, and yet it so transcends the teaching aspect of it that it seems to me the most remarkable model for what a novel should be, when you want to say something with a 'message'. Otherwise if it has a message, the hell with it.""

"No government, no big organization, will pay for the truth. To take a crude example: can you imagine the British Government commissioning E. M. Forster to write A Passage to India? He could only write it because he was not dependent on State aid."

"He has quite lost the touch of preciousness, of exaggerated care for nature and the relationships of human beings, that faintly irritate some readers of his earlier books. He used once to write at times too much as a graduate (even occasionally as an undergraduate) of King's College, Cambridge (perhaps the most civilized place in the world), who has had an amour with Italy and another with the god Pan. In A Passage to India (as, indeed, in Howards End), Pan is only implicit, the mysterious is more diffused, the imagination at once richer, less fantastic, and more restrained. It is a novel that from most novelists would be an amazing piece of work. Coming from Mr. Forster, it is not amazing, but it is, I think, the best and most interesting book he has written."

"Lawrence was a powerful early influence on me, Forster a more enduring one."

"His light blue eyes behind his spectacles were like those of a baby who remembers his previous incarnation and is more amused than dismayed to find himself reborn in new surroundings. He had a baby's vulnerability, which is also the invulnerability of a creature whom one dare not harm."

"When the newspapers compare Chamberlain to Abe Lincoln and Jesus Christ, they aren't being in the least sacrilegious; because their Lincoln and their Christ are utter phonies, anyhow. The newspapers are moved to tears by the spectacle of a gentleman standing his ground against a non-gentleman. So they call him 'England'. Well, my 'England' is E.M.; the anti-heroic hero, with his straggly straw moustache, his light gay blue baby-eyes and his elderly stoop. Instead of a folded umbrella or a brown uniform, his emblems are his tweed cap (which is too small for him) and the odd-shaped brown paper parcels in which he carries his belongings from country to town and back again. While the others tell their followers to be ready to die, he advises us to live as if we were immortal. And he really does this himself, although he is as anxious and afraid as any of us, and never for an instant pretends not to be. He and his books and what they stand for are all that is truly worth saving from Hitler; and the vast majority of people on this island aren't even aware that he exists."

"It is characteristic of Mr. Forster, to whom the Lares are living gods and the garden wych-elm a Hamadryad, that he titles his book after a house wherein personal relations ought to matter but are routed by telegrams and anger. For such a quality, and for the true comic sense with which he renders colloquial speech to betray cunning shadowings of personality in the speakers, the word Forsterian is already demanded. But "Howards End" is too big a thing to be either set aside or grappled to our souls at once; it will have to find its level after repeated regustation: such writing demands such reading."

"If I were asked to point to a passage which combined all that prose fiction should not be—lurid sentimentality, preposterous morals, turgid and sickly style—I do not think I could point to anything worse than the closing chapters of Howard's End. I meant to say how good, in the earlier part of the book, is much of the character-painting. The real talent of the author is for delicate, ironic painting of straightforward natures. How excellent is Aunt Juley! The quiet lives of people of that type, to whom nothing happens, who do not meet with manslaughterers and bastards and Jane-Eyre-borrowed lunatics in their walks abroad—that is what your author was born to depict. And I am now going to read a few chapters of Mrs. Gaskell to take the taste of Howard's End out of my mouth."