David Leavitt

E. M. Forster

The love of a young British woman named Lucy Honeychurch for a British expatriate living in Italy is condemned by her stuffy, middle-class guardians, who prefer an eligible man of their own choosing.

A Room with a View

lulu p :)

but this book lies motionless, to be caressed all the morning by the sun and to raise its covers slightly, as though acknowledging the caress

Draculelle

“have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same fime-beautiful?"

To behave wildly at the sight of death is pardonable. But to discuss it afterwards, to pass from discussion into silence, and through silence into sympathy, that is an error, not of a startled emotion, but of the whole fabric.

Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practise, and we welcome 'nerves' or any other shibboleth that will cloak our personal desire.

Abigail Mills

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

Helen 

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. 

Therefore - not "therefore I kissed you", because the book made me do that, and I wish to goodness I had more self-control. I'm not ashamed. I don't apologize. But it has frightened you, and you may not have noticed that I love you. Or would you have told me to go, and dealt with a tremendous thing so lightly?

Yes. I have, and sank down as if suddenly weary. I'm the same kind of brute at bottom. This desire to govern a woman - it lies very deep, and men and women must fight it together before they shall enter the Garden. 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.' 

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 someone 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. 

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. 

A Room with a View quotes

Join the club