Forster's Howards End quotes, just because:

"'What? What's that? Your universities? Oh yes, you have learned men, who collect more facts . . . They collect facts, and facts, and empires of facts. but which of them will rekindle the light within?"

And this . . .

Actual life is full of false clues and signposts that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes. The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken. On a tragedy of that kind our national morality is duly silent. It assumes that preparation against danger is in itself a good, and that men, like nations, are the better for staggering through life fully armed. The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essences is romantic beauty.

Margaret hoped that for the future she would be less cautious, not more cautious, than she had been in the past.

What I love about E.M. Forster is the effortless way in which the story unfolds, the way the characters are revealed, the way the social agenda is woven into the narrative (Forster seemed to want to point out the ills of society as much as Dickens did, but he handled it so much better). Howards End not only highlights the plight of the less fortunate classes when they bump into the unconcern of the privileged, but really gets into some of the fundamental gender divides of Forster's day.

Margaret Schlegel, Helen Schlegel, and their unpromising brother Tibby are intellectuals living on their own in cosmopolitan London. They cross paths first with the sporty, hearty average family of Wilcoxes while abroad and then with intellectual wannabe Leonard Bast at a concert. These two worlds, which meet at the vortex that is Howards End, collide with disastrous effect while Margaret heroically maintains what she can while inspiring the idea that if we 'only connect' all will come right in the end. I love Margaret! One of the best female characters ever imagined by a male author, in my opinion, even if she does have an initial tendency to mistrust "the periods of quiet that are essential to true growth." Though Forster does such a great job at female characterization that one hardly ever remembers he is a Victorian male writing Victorian women.

Another interesting quote resulting from a rather humourous scene involving the debating club Margaret Schlegel and Helen Schlegel attend. They discuss the fate of those overworked, underfed clerks like Leonard Bast:

The female mind, though cruelly practical in daily life, cannot bear to hear ideals belittled in conversation, and Miss Schlegel was asked however she could say such dreadful things, and what it would profit Mr. Bast if he gained the whole world and lost his own soul. She answered, 'Nothing, but he would not gain his soul until he had gained a little of the world.' Then they said no they did not believe it, and she admitted that an overworked clerk may save his soul in the superterrestrial sense, where the effort will be taken for the deed, but she denied that he will ever explore the spiritual resources of this world, will ever know the rarer joys of the the body, or attain to clear and passionate intercourse with his fellows. Others had attacked the fabric of society -- property, interest, etc.; she only fixed her eyes on a few human beings, to see how, under present conditions, they could be made happier. Doing good to humanity was useless: the many-colored efforts thereto spreading over the vast area like films and resulting in universal gray. To do good to one, or, as in this case, to a few, was the utmost she dare hope for.