A Room With A View

by E.M. Forster

I revel in shaking off the trammels of respectability, as you know.”

It is so difficult—at least, I find it difficult—to understand people who speak the truth.”

have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time—beautiful?”

“Oh, dear!” breathed the little old lady, and shuddered as if all the winds of heaven had entered the apartment.

It was pleasant, too, to fling wide the windows, pinching the fingers in unfamiliar fastenings, to lean out into sunshine with beautiful hills and trees and marble churches opposite, and close below, the Arno, gurgling against the embankment of the road.

“A smell! a true Florentine smell! Every city, let me teach you, has its own smell.”

“One doesn’t come to Italy for niceness,” was the retort; “one comes for life.

Two lone females in an unknown town. Now, this is what I call an adventure.”

Could anything be more majestic, more pathetic, beautiful, true? How little, we feel, avails knowledge and technical cleverness against a man who truly feels!”

Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.

By understanding George you may learn to understand yourself. It will be good for both of you.”

We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us rather love one another, and work and rejoice. I don’t believe in this world sorrow.”

There’s enough sorrow in the world, isn’t there, without trying to invent it.

It so happened that Lucy, who found daily life rather chaotic, entered a more solid world when she opened the piano.

The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom. Lucy had done so never.

Like every true performer, she was intoxicated by the mere feel of the notes: they were fingers caressing her own; and by touch, not by sound alone, did she come to her desire.

she loved iced coffee and meringues.

“If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting both for us and for her.”

She has marked the kingdom of this world, how full it is of wealth, and beauty, and war—a radiant crust, built around the central fires, spinning towards the receding heavens.

The river was a lion that morning in strength, voice, and colour.

After all, I do believe that birds and trees and the sky are the most wonderful things in life, and that the people who live amongst them must be the best.

A rebel she was, but not of the kind he understood—a rebel who desired, not a wider dwelling-room, but equality beside the man she loved. For Italy was offering her the most priceless of all possessions—her own soul.

One launched into enthusiasms only to collapse gracefully, and pick oneself up amid sympathetic laughter.

The melody rose, unprofitably magical. It broke; it was resumed broken, not marching once from the cradle to the grave. The sadness of the incomplete—the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art—throbbed in its disjected phrases, and made the nerves of the audience throb.

I have reflected. It is Fate. Everything is Fate. We are flung together by Fate, drawn apart by Fate—flung together, drawn apart. The twelve winds blow us—we settle nothing—”

So the grittiness went out of life. It generally did at Windy Corner.

Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice, and we welcome “nerves” or any other shibboleth that will cloak our personal desire.

“There is a certain amount of kindness, just as there is a certain amount of light,”

“We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows.

yes, choose a place where you won’t do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are wo...

beneath the light of an eternal dawn, the music that never gains, never wanes, but ripples for ever like the tideless seas of fairyland.

He daren’t let a woman decide. He’s the type who’s kept Europe back for a thousand years.

Every moment of his life he’s forming you, telling you what’s charming or amusing or ladylike, telling you what a man thinks womanly; and you, you of all women, listen to his voice instead of to your own.

I’m not ashamed. I don’t apologize. But it has frightened you, and you may not have noticed that I love you.

This desire to govern a woman—it lies very deep, and men and women must fight it together before they shall enter the garden.

But I do love you surely in a better way than he does.” He thought. “Yes—really in a better way. I want you to have your own thoughts even when I hold you in my arms.”

but I meet you again when all the world is glorious water and sun. As you came through the wood I saw that nothing else mattered.

I wanted to live and have my chance of joy.”

“I have been into the dark, and I am going back into it, unless you will try to understand.”

But, once in the open air, she paused. Some emotion—pity, terror, love, but the emotion was strong—seized her, and she was aware of autumn.

A leaf, violently agitated, danced past her, while other leaves lay motionless. That the earth was hastening to re-enter darkness, and the shadows of those trees over Windy Corner?

The sky had grown wilder since he stood there last hour, giving to the land a tragic greatness that is rare in Surrey.

Grey clouds were charging across tissues of white, which stretched and shredded and tore slowly, until through their final layers there gleamed a hint of the disappearing blue.

“‘Life’ wrote a friend of mine, ‘is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.’

It isn’t possible to love and to 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.”

When I think what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love—Marry him; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.”

But they were conscious of a love more mysterious than this.