Quotes from Howards End

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.

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.

Personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever, and not this outer life of telegrams and anger.

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.

It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven.

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.

The house was very quiet, and the fog—we are in November now—pressed against the windows like an excluded ghost.

To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it.

Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him—that is the best account of it that has been yet given. Squalor and tragedy can beckon to all that is great in us, and strengthen the wings of love.

A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man.

Don't brood too much on the superiority of the unseen to the seen.

It is those who cannot connect who hasten to cast the first stone.

One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister.