# A Room with a View Tags: #literature ## Metadata * Author: [E. M. Forster and Lionel Trilling](https://www.amazon.comundefined) * ASIN: B09HR5FQRJ * ISBN: 1954525796 * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09HR5FQRJ * [Kindle link](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09HR5FQRJ) ## Highlights “About old Mr. Emerson—I hardly know. 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?” “Beautiful?” said Miss Bartlett, puzzled at the word. “Are not beauty and delicacy the same?” — location: [191](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09HR5FQRJ&location=191) ^ref-10954 --- But let yourself go. You are inclined to get muddled, if I may judge from last night. 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. By understanding George you may learn to understand yourself. It will be good for both of you.” — location: [457](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09HR5FQRJ&location=457) ^ref-33676 --- We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us rather love one another, and work and rejoice. I don’t believe in this world sorrow.” — location: [469](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09HR5FQRJ&location=469) ^ref-25606 --- It struck her that it was hopeless to look for chivalry in such a man. He would do her no harm by idle gossip; he was trustworthy, intelligent, and even kind; he might even have a high opinion of her. But he lacked chivalry; his thoughts, like his behaviour, would not be modified by awe. It was useless to say to him, “And would you—” and hope that he would complete the sentence for himself, averting his eyes from her nakedness like the knight in that beautiful picture. She had been in his arms, and he remembered it, just as he remembered the blood on the photographs that she had bought in Alinari’s shop. It was not exactly that a man had died; something had happened to the living: they had come to a situation where character tells, and where Childhood enters upon the branching paths of Youth. — location: [755](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09HR5FQRJ&location=755) ^ref-50828 --- From her feet the ground sloped sharply into view, and violets ran down in rivulets and streams and cataracts, irrigating the hillside with blue, eddying round the tree stems, collecting into pools in the hollows, covering the grass with spots of azure foam. But never again were they in such profusion; this terrace was the well-head, the primal source whence beauty gushed out to water the earth. — location: [1142](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09HR5FQRJ&location=1142) ^ref-62900 --- But Italy worked some marvel in her. It gave her light, and—which he held more precious—it gave her shadow. Soon he detected in her a wonderful reticence. She was like a woman of Leonardo da Vinci’s, whom we love not so much for herself as for the things that she will not tell us. The things are assuredly not of this life; no woman of Leonardo’s could have anything so vulgar as a “story.” She did develop most wonderfully day by day. — location: [1460](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09HR5FQRJ&location=1460) ^ref-62090 --- “No, I have said nothing indiscreet. I foresaw at Florence that her quiet, uneventful childhood must end, and it has ended. I realized dimly enough that she might take some momentous step. She has taken it. She has learnt—you will let me talk freely, as I have begun freely—she has learnt what it is to love: the greatest lesson, some people will tell you, that our earthly life provides.” — location: [1557](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09HR5FQRJ&location=1557) ^ref-23970 --- Such was the embrace. He considered, with truth, that it had been a failure. 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. — location: [1806](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09HR5FQRJ&location=1806) ^ref-38784 --- A rebel she was, but not of the kind he understood—a rebel who desired, not a wider dwelling-room, but equality beside the man she loved. For Italy was offering her the most priceless of all possessions—her own soul. — location: [1841](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09HR5FQRJ&location=1841) ^ref-21249 --- The sadness of the incomplete—the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art—throbbed in its disjected phrases, and made the nerves of the audience throb. — location: [2033](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09HR5FQRJ&location=2033) ^ref-43027 --- she reflected that it is impossible to foretell the future with any degree of accuracy, that it is impossible to rehearse life. A fault in the scenery, a face in the audience, an irruption of the audience on to the stage, and all our carefully planned gestures mean nothing, or mean too much. — location: [2237](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09HR5FQRJ&location=2237) ^ref-445 --- Mrs. Honeychurch might have flamed out. She did not. She said: “Come here, old lady—thank you for putting away my bonnet—kiss me.” And, though nothing is perfect, Lucy felt for the moment that her mother and Windy Corner and the Weald in the declining sun were perfect. So the grittiness went out of life. It generally did at Windy Corner. At the last minute, when the social machine was clogged hopelessly, one member or other of the family poured in a drop of oil. Cecil despised their methods—perhaps rightly. At all events, they were not his own. — location: [2304](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09HR5FQRJ&location=2304) ^ref-1440 --- It is obvious enough for the reader to conclude, “She loves young Emerson.” A reader in Lucy’s place would not find it obvious. Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice, and we welcome “nerves” or any other shibboleth that will cloak our personal desire. She loved Cecil; George made her nervous; will the reader explain to her that the phrases should have been reversed? — location: [2382](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09HR5FQRJ&location=2382) ^ref-48405 --- “There is a certain amount of kindness, just as there is a certain amount of light,” he continued in measured tones. “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.” — location: [2538](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09HR5FQRJ&location=2538) ^ref-64529 --- The kindness that Mr. Beebe and Lucy had always known to exist in him came out suddenly, like sunlight touching a vast landscape—a touch of the morning sun? — location: [2553](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09HR5FQRJ&location=2553) ^ref-15818 --- Perhaps anything that he did would have pleased Lucy, but his awkwardness went straight to her heart; men were not gods after all, but as human and as clumsy as girls; even men might suffer from unexplained desires, and need help. — location: [2561](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09HR5FQRJ&location=2561) ^ref-8915 --- he had leant over the parapet by the Arno and said to her: “I shall want to live, I tell you.” He wanted to live now, to win at tennis, to stand for all he was worth in the sun—in the sun which had begun to decline and was shining in her eyes; and he did win. — location: [2615](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09HR5FQRJ&location=2615) ^ref-63446 --- But Lucy had developed since the spring. That is to say, she was now better able to stifle the emotions of which the conventions and the world disapprove. — location: [2707](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09HR5FQRJ&location=2707) ^ref-6266 --- 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. She — location: [2709](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09HR5FQRJ&location=2709) ^ref-31919 --- “Lucy, be quick—there’s no time for us to talk now—come to me as you came in the spring, and afterwards I will be gentle and explain. I have cared for you since that man died. I cannot live without you. ‘No good,’ I thought; ‘she is marrying some one else’; but I meet you again when all the world is glorious water and sun. As you came through the wood I saw that nothing else mattered. I called. I wanted to live and have my chance of joy.” — location: [2814](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09HR5FQRJ&location=2814) ^ref-63040 --- When we were only acquaintances, you let me be myself, but now you’re always protecting me.” Her voice swelled. “I won’t be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. — location: [2897](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09HR5FQRJ&location=2897) ^ref-36112 --- 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. — location: [2938](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09HR5FQRJ&location=2938) ^ref-58910 --- Lucy still sat at the piano with her hands over the keys. She was glad, but he had expected greater gladness. Her mother bent over her. Freddy, to whom she had been singing, reclined on the floor with his head against her, and an unlit pipe between his lips. Oddly enough, the group was beautiful. Mr. Beebe, who loved the art of the past, was reminded of a favourite theme, the Santa Conversazione, in which people who care for one another are painted chatting together about noble things—a theme neither sensual nor sensational, and therefore ignored by the art of to-day. Why should Lucy want either to marry or to travel when she had such friends at home? — location: [3186](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09HR5FQRJ&location=3186) ^ref-14103 --- “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.’ — location: [3327](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09HR5FQRJ&location=3327) ^ref-1016 --- Somehow it was impossible to cheat this old man. To George, to Cecil, she would have lied again; but he seemed so near the end of things, so dignified in his approach to the gulf, of which he gave one account, and the books that surrounded him another, so mild to the rough paths that he had traversed, that the true chivalry—not the worn-out chivalry of sex, but the true chivalry that all the young may show to all the old—awoke in her, and, at whatever risk, she told him that Cecil was not her companion to Greece. — location: [3405](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09HR5FQRJ&location=3405) ^ref-5971 --- very glorious, it is difficult.” She was still silent. “ ‘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. Man has to pick up the use of his functions as he goes along—especially the function of Love.” — location: [3420](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09HR5FQRJ&location=3420) ^ref-50377 --- “You love the boy body and soul, plainly, directly, as he loves you, and no other word expresses it. You won’t marry the other man for his sake.” — location: [3424](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09HR5FQRJ&location=3424) ^ref-61226 --- You must marry, or your life will be wasted. You have gone too far to retreat. I have no time for the tenderness, and the comradeship, and the poetry, and the things that really matter, and for which you marry. I know that, with George, you will find them, and that you love him. Then be his wife. He is already part of you. Though you fly to Greece, and never see him again, or forget his very name, George will work in your thoughts till you die. 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.” — location: [3429](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09HR5FQRJ&location=3429) ^ref-20271 --- When I think what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love—Marry him; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.” — location: [3439](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09HR5FQRJ&location=3439) ^ref-1801 --- They sank upon their knees, invisible from the road, they hoped, and began to whisper one another’s names. Ah! It was worth while; it was the great joy that they had expected, and countless little joys of which they had never dreamt. — location: [3524](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09HR5FQRJ&location=3524) ^ref-8948 ---