Quotes from book
A Room with a View

A Room with a View
E.M. Forster

A Room with a View is a 1908 novel by English writer E. M. Forster, about a young woman in the restrained culture of Edwardian era England. Set in Italy and England, the story is both a romance and a humorous critique of English society at the beginning of the 20th century. Merchant Ivory produced an award-winning film adaptation in 1985.

E.M. Forster photo

“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 book A Room with a View

Source: A Room with a View

E.M. Forster photo

“Don't go fighting against the Spring.”

E.M. Forster book A Room with a View

Source: A Room with a View

E.M. Forster photo

“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 book A Room with a View

Source: A Room with a View

E.M. Forster photo

“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 book A Room with a View

Source: A Room with a View

E.M. Forster photo

“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 book A Room with a View

Source: A Room with a View

E.M. Forster photo

“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 from experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.”

E.M. Forster book A Room with a View

Source: A Room with a View (1908), Ch. 19

E.M. Forster photo

“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 book A Room with a View

Source: A Room with a View

E.M. Forster photo

“Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?”

E.M. Forster book A Room with a View

Source: A Room with a View

E.M. Forster photo

“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 book A Room with a View

Source: A Room with a View

E.M. Forster photo

“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 common place 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 book A Room with a View

Source: A Room with a View (1908), Ch. 3