I am not quite finished with E.M. Forster's novel Howards End, and I am still in the foggy, misty stage where the novel hangs around me, soaking me to the skin. So, I am not quite ready to talk seriously about the book. All I can do right now is sigh heavily and share some quotes I like.
"She felt that those who prepare for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy. It is necessary to prepare for an examination, or a dinner-party, or a possible fall in the price of stock; those who attempt human relations must adopt another method, or fail."
"To be humble and kind, to go straight ahead, to love people rather than pity them, to remember the submerged - well one can't do all these things at once, worse luck, because they're so contradictory. It's then that proportion comes in - to live by proportion. Don't begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed."
"The German is always on the lookout for beauty. He may miss it through stupidity, or misinterpret it, but he is always asking beauty to enter his life, and I believe that in the end it will come."
"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. Margaret hoped that for the future she would be less cautious, not more cautious than she had been in the past."
"The outburst ended in a swamp of books. No disrespect to these great names. The fault is ours, not theirs. They mean us to use them for sign-posts, and are not to blame if, in our weakness, we mistake the sign-post for the the destination."
It may be a terrible blasphemy, but I think I like Howards End better than A Room With a View.
