A Room with a View Quotes by E.M. Forster (2024)

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“It isn't possible to love and 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.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

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“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. Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

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“When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

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“Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room With A View

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“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 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.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

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“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.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

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“Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

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“Life' wrote a friend of mine, 'is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

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“It is fate that I am here,' George persisted, 'but you can call it Italy if it makes you less unhappy.”
― E. M. Forster, A Room with a View

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“It is so difficult - at least, I find it difficult - to understand people who speak the truth.”
― E. M. Forster, A Room with a View

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“By the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes--a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.”
― E. M. Forster, A Room with a View

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“I taught him, 'he quavered, "to trust in love. I said:'when love comes, that is reality.' I said: '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, A Room With a View

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“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, A Room with a View

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“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, A Room with a View

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“When we were only acquaintances, you let me be myself, but now you're always protecting me... I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. Can't I be trusted to face the truth but I must get it second-hand through you? A woman's place!”
― E. M. Forster, A Room with a View

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“... there are shadows because there are hills.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

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“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, A Room with a View

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“No, he is not tactful, yet have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet, at the same time, beautiful?”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

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“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, A Room with a View

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“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, A Room with a View

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“Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

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“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.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

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“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, A Room with a View

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“Don't go fighting against the Spring.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

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“One doesn't come to Italy for niceness," was the retort; "one comes for life. Buon giorno! Buon giorno!”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

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“There is much that is immortal in this medieval lady. The dragons have gone, and so have the knights, but still she lingers in our midst. She reigned in many an early Victorian castle, and was Queen of much early Victorian song. It is sweet to protect her in the intervals of business, sweet to pay her honour when she has cooked our dinner well. But alas! the creature grows degenerate. In her heart also there are springing up strange desires. She too is enamoured of heavy winds, and vast panoramas, and green expanses of the sea. 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. Men, declaring that she inspires them to it, move joyfully over the surface, having the most delightful meetings with other men, happy, not because they are masculine, but because they are alive. Before the show breaks up she would like to drop the august title of the Eternal Woman, and go there as her transitory self.”
― E. M. Forster, A Room With a View

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“...though nothing is damaged, everything is changed.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

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“Of course he despised the world as a whole; every thoughtful man should; it is almost a test of refinement.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

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“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.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

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“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, A Room with a View

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