E. M. Forster - A Room with a View (1908)

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

E. M. Forster
But this time I'm not to blame; I want you to believe that. I simply slipped into those violets. No, I want to be really truthful. I am a little to blame. The sky, you know, was gold, and the ground all blue, and for a moment he looked like some one in a book.

E. M. Forster
Love felt and returned, love which our bodies exact and our hearts have transfigured, love which is the most real thing that we shall ever meet, reappeared now as the world's enemy, and she must stifle it.

E. M. Forster
It was not that ladies were inferior to men; it was that they were different. Their mission was to inspire others to achievement rather than to achieve themselves. Indirectly, by means of tact and a spotless name, a lady could accomplish much. But if she rushed into the fray herself she would be first censured, then despised, and finally ignored.

E. M. Forster
Of course he despised the world as a whole; every thoughtful man should; it is almost a test of refinement.

E. M. Forster
Then she lay on her back and gazed at the cloudless sky. Mr. Beebe, whose opinion of her rose daily, whispered to his niece that that was the proper way to behave if any little thing went wrong.

E. M. Forster
Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand.

E. M. Forster
Passion should believe itself irresistible. It should forget civility and consideration and all the other curses of a refined nature. Above all, it should never ask for leave where there is a right of way.

E. M. Forster
She only felt that the candle would burn better, the packing go easier, the world be happier, if she could give and receive some human love.

E. M. Forster
The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.

E. M. Forster
The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.

E. M. Forster
Take an old man's word; there's nothing worse than a muddle in all the world. It is easy to face Death and Fate, and the things that sound so dreadful. It is on my muddles that I look back with horror - on the things that I might have avoided. We can help one another but little. I used to think I could teach young people the whole of life, but I know better now, and all my teaching of George has come down to this: beware of muddle.

E. M. Forster
It makes a difference doesn't it, whether we fully fence ourselves in, or whether we are fenced out by the barriers of others?

E. M. Forster
I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult.

E. M. Forster
I think - I think - I think how little they think what lies so near them.

E. M. Forster
Men were not gods after all, but as human and as clumsy as girls.

E. M. Forster
The traveller who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or the corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women under it.

E. M. Forster
If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting—both for us and for her.

E. M. Forster
At times our need for a sympathetic gesture is so great that we care not what exactly it signifies or how much we may have to pay for it afterwards.

E. M. Forster
But after all, what have we to do with taverns? Real menace belongs to the drawing-room.

E. M. Forster
Italy and London are the only places where I don't feel to exist on sufferance.

E. M. Forster
Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.

E. M. Forster
She stopped and leant her elbows against the parapet of the embankment. He did likewise. There is at times a magic in identity of position; it is one of the things that have suggested to us eternal comradeship.

E. M. Forster
Lucy was suffering from the most grievous wrong which this world has yet discovered: diplomatic advantage had been taken of her sincerity, of her craving for sympathy and love. Such a wrong is not easily forgotten. Never again did she expose herself without due consideration and precaution against rebuff. And such a wrong may react disastrously upon the soul.

E. M. Forster
By the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes—a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.

E. M. Forster
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 transalate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions.

E. M. Forster
This desire to govern a woman — it lies very deep, and men and women must fight it together.... But I do love you surely in a better way then 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.

E. M. Forster
It so happened that Lucy, who found daily life rather chaotic, entered a more solid world when she opened the piano. She was then no longer either deferential or patronizing; no longer either a rebel or a slave.

E. M. Forster
One doesn't come to Italy for niceness," was the retort; "one comes for life. Buon giorno! Buon giorno!

E. M. Forster
'Life,' wrote a friend of mine, 'is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.' I think he puts it well.

E. M. Forster