E.M. Forster Quote

People turned out to be alive. Hitherto he had supposed that they were what he pretended to be — flat pieces of cardboard stamped with a conventional design — but as he strolled about the courts at night and saw through the windows some men singing and others arguing and others at their books, there came by no process of reason a conviction that they were human beings with feelings akin to his own. He had never lived frankly since Mr Abrahams's school, and despite Dr Barry did not mean to begin; but he saw that while deceiving others he had been deceived, and mistaken them for the empty creatures he wanted them to think he was. No, they too had insides. But, O Lord, not such an inside as mine.

E.M. Forster

People turned out to be alive. Hitherto he had supposed that they were what he pretended to be — flat pieces of cardboard stamped with a conventional design — but as he strolled about the courts at night and saw through the windows some men singing and others arguing and others at their books, there came by no process of reason a conviction that they were human beings with feelings akin to his own. He had never lived frankly since Mr Abrahams's school, and despite Dr Barry did not mean to begin; but he saw that while deceiving others he had been deceived, and mistaken them for the empty creatures he wanted them to think he was. No, they too had insides. But, O Lord, not such an inside as mine.

Related Quotes

About E.M. Forster

Edward Morgan Forster (1 January 1879 – 7 June 1970) was an English author, best known for his novels, particularly A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924).
He also wrote numerous short stories, essays, speeches and broadcasts, as well as a limited number of biographies and some pageant plays. He also co-authored the opera Billy Budd (1951). Today, he is considered one of the most successful of the Edwardian era English novelists.
After attending Tonbridge School he studied history and classics at King's College, Cambridge, where he met fellow future writers such as Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf. He then travelled throughout Europe before publishing his first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, in 1905.
Many of his novels examine class difference and hypocrisy. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 22 separate years.