A Room with a View and Howards End Quotes

“Though life is very glorious, it is difficult.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View and Howards End

“I cannot help thinking that there is something to admire in every one, even if you do not approve of them.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View and Howards End:

“It happened like this, if it happened at all. I would rather go up to heaven by myself than be pushed by cherubs.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View and Howards End

“Because we think it improves our characters. But he is kind to people because he loves them; and they find him out, and are offended, or frightened.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View and Howards End

“I’ve often thought about it, Helen. It’s one of the most interesting things in the world. The truth is that there is a great outer life that you and I have never touched—a life in which telegrams and anger count. Personal relations, that we think supreme, are not supreme there. There love means marriage settlements, death, death duties. So far I’m clear. But here my difficulty. This outer life, though obviously horrid, often seems the real one—there’s grit in it. It does breed character. Do personal relations lead to sloppiness in the end?”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View and Howards End:

“It did not do to think, nor, for the matter of that to feel. She gave up trying to understand herself, and joined the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words. The armies are full of pleasant and pious folk. But they have yielded to the only enemy that matters—the enemy within. They have sinned against passion and truth, and vain will be their strife after virtue. As the years pass, they are censured. Their pleasantry and their piety show cracks, their wit becomes cynicism, their unselfishness hypocrisy; they feel and produce discomfort wherever they go. They have sinned against Eros and against Pallas Athene, and not by any heavenly intervention, but by the ordinary course of nature, those allied deities will be avenged.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View and Howards End:

“One is certain of nothing but the truth of one’s own emotions.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View and Howards End:

“Why has not England a great mythology? our folklore has never advanced beyond daintiness, and the greater melodies about our country-side have all issued through the pipes of Greece. Deep and true as the native imagination can be, it seems to have failed here. It has stopped with the witches and the fairies. It cannot vivify one fraction of a summer field, or give names to half a dozen stars. England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature—for the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk. At”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with A View and Howards End

“Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with A View and Howards End

“But the poetry of that kiss, the wonder of it, the magic that there was in life for hours after it—who can describe that?”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End & A Room with a View

“You are not to say ‘stink,’ ” interrupted Helen; “at least, you may say it, but you must pretend you are being funny while you say it.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View and Howards End:

“Her brain darted up and down; it grew pliant and strong. Her conclusion was that any human being lies nearer to the unseen than any organization, and from this she never varied.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View and Howards End: