'Howards End' Quotes

Howards End is a novel by E.M. Forster. Written 1910, the book is sometimes considered Forster's greatest work. Here are a few quotes from Howards End, by E.M. Forster.

• "Railway termini ... are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return."
  - E.M. Forster, Howards End, Ch. 2
  
  
• "'Esprit de classe' -- if one may coin the phrase -- was strong in Mrs Munt. She sat quivering while a member of the lower orders deposited a metal funnel, a saucepan and a garden squirt beside the roll of oilcloth."
  - E.M. Forster, Howards End, Ch. 3
  
  
• "I felt for a moment that the whole Wilcox family was a fraud, just a wall of newspapers and motor-cars and golf-clubs, and that if it fell I should find nothing behind it but panic and emptiness."
  - E.M. Forster, Howards End, Ch. 2
  
  
• "It will be generally admitted that Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man. All sorts and conditions are satisfied by it."
  - E.M. Forster, Howards End, Ch. 5
  
  
• "Was Mrs Wilcox one of the unsatisfactory people--there are many of them--who dangle intimacy and then withdraw it? They evoke our interests and affections, and keep the life of the spirit dawdling round them. Then they withdraw. When physical passion is involved, there is a definite name for such behavior--flirting--and if carried far enough it is punishable by law. But no law--not public opinion even--punishes those who coquette with friendship, thought the dull ache that they inflict, the sense of misdirected effort and exhaustion, may be as intolerable. Was she one of these?"
  - E.M. Forster, Howards End, Ch. 10
  
  
• "A certain austerity of demeanor was best, and she added: 'I don't really want a Yuletide gift, though. In fact, I'd rather not."
  - E.M. Forster, Howards End, Ch. 10
  
  
• "London was beginning to illuminate herself against the night. Electric lights sizzled and jagged in the main thoroughfares, gas lamps in the side-streets glimmered a canary gold or green. The sky was a crimson battlefield of spring, but London was not afraid. Her smoke mitigated the splendor, and the clouds down Oxford Street were a delicately painted ceiling, which adorned while it did not distract. She has never known the clear-cut armies of the purer air."
  - E.M. Forster, Howards End, Ch. 14
  
  
• "I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place."
  - E.M. Forster, Howards End, Ch. 15
  
  
• "Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the gray, sober against the fire."
  - E.M. Forster, Howards End, Ch. 22
  
  
• "Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die."
  - E.M. Forster, Howards End, Ch. 22
  
  
• "There is certainly no rest for us on the earth. But there is happiness, and as Margaret descended the mound on her lover's arm she felt that she was having her share."
  - E.M. Forster, Howards End, Ch. 26
  
  
• "In these English farms, if anywhere, one might see life steadily and see it whole, group in one vision its transitoriness and its eternal youth, connect -- connect without bitterness until all men are brothers."
  - E.M. Forster, Howards End, Ch. 33
  
  
• "The present flowed by them like a stream. The tree rustled. It had made music before they were born, and would continue after their deaths, but its song was of the moment. The moment had passed. The tree rustled again. Their senses were sharpened, and they seemed to apprehend life. Life passed. The tree rustled again."
  - E.M. Forster, Howards End, Ch. 41