Social Convention Quotes

“Traditional values and truths are often rooted in social conventions, dogmas, or power structures, so they need to be reexamined and redefined.
We can uncover deeper, perhaps unsettling truths about ourselves and the world by moving beyond conventional morality and perspectives. .("Behind the frosted glass”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Does it seem reasonable that she should play so wonderfully, and live so quietly? I suspect that one day she will be wonderful in both. The watertight compartments in her will break down, and music and life will mingle.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“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. To one of her upbringing, and of her destination, the weakness of men was a truth unfamiliar, but she had surmised it at Florence, when George threw her photographs into the river Arno.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“Was this the reception his action would get from the world? Of course, he despised the world as whole; every thoughtful man should; it is almost a test of refinement.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“I foresaw at Florence that her quiet, uneventful childhood must end, and it has ended. I realised dimly enough that she might take some momentous steps. She has taken it. She has learned — you will let me talk freely, as I have begun freely — she has learned what it is to love: the greatest lesson, some people will tell you, that our earthly life provides. She has learned through you.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“I foresaw at Florence that her quiet, uneventful childhood must end, and it has ended. I realised dimly enough that she might take some momentous steps. She has taken it. She has learned — you will let me talk freely, as I have begun freely — she has learned what it is to love: the greatest lesson, some people will tell you, that our earthly life provides.’ It was now time for him to wave his hat at the approaching trio. He did not omit to do so. ‘She has learned through you,’ and if his voice was still not clerical, it was now also sincere; ‘let it be your care that her knowledge is profitable to her.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“You talk as if I was a kind of poetess sort of person.’
‘I don’t know that you aren’t. I connect you with a view — a certain type of view. Why shouldn’t you connect me with a room?”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“Italy had quickened Cecil, not to tolerance, but to irritation. He saw that the local society was narrow, but instead of saying, ‘Does this very much matter?’ he rebelled, and tried to substitute for it the society he called broad. He did not realise that Lucy had consecrated her environment by the thousand little civilities that create a tenderness in time, and that though her eyes saw its defects, her heart refused to despite it entirely. Nor did he realise a more important point — that if she was too great for this society, she was too great for all society, and had reached the stage where personal intercourse would alone satisfy her. A rebel, she was, but not 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.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“The melody rose, unprofitably magical. It broke; it was resumed broken, not marching once from the cradle to the grave. 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.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“How can we return to Nature when we have never been with her?”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“It is Fate that I am here,’ persisted George. ‘But you can call it Italy if it makes you less unhappy.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“You have each other and all these woods to walk in, so full of beautiful things; and poor Charlotte has only the water turned off and plumbers. You are young, dears, and however clever young people are, and however many books they read, they will never guess what it feels like to grow old.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“His voice moved her deeply, and she wished to remain near him. How dreadful if she really wished to remain near him!”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“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?”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“She frowns a little — not in anger, but as a brave child frowns when he is trying not to cry.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“He had no glimpse of the comradeship after which the girl's soul yearned.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“He had no glimpse of the comradeship after which the girl’s soul yearned.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“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.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“She might be forgetting her Italy, but she was noticing more things in her England.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“He simply enfolded her in his manly arms.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“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.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“Have you ever talked to Vyse without feeling tired?’
‘I can scarcely discuss —’
‘No, but have you ever? He is the sort who are all right so long as they keep to things — books, pictures — but kill when they come to people. That’s why I’ll speak out through all this muddle even now. It’s shocking enough to lose you in any case, but generally a man must deny himself joy, and I would have held back if your Cecil had been a different person. I would never have let myself go. But I saw him first in the National Gallery, when he winced because my father mispronounced the names of great painters. Then he brings us here, and we find it is to play some silly trick on a kind neighbour. That is the man all over — playing tricks on people, on the most sacred form of life that he can find. Next, I meet you together, and find him protecting and teaching you and your mother to be shocked, when it was for you to settle whether you were shocked or no. Cecil all over again. He daren’t let a woman decide. He’s the type who’s kept Europe back for a thousand years. Every moment of his life he’s forming you, telling you what’s charming or amusing or ladylike, telling you what a man thinks is womanly; and you, you of all women, listen to his voice instead of to your own. So it was at the rectory, when I met you both again; so it has been the whole of this afternoon. 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 apologise. 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? But therefore — therefore, I settled to fight him.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“I’m the same kind of brute at bottom. This desire to govern a woman — it lies very deep, and men and woman 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.’ He stretched them towards her. ‘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 marring 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.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“But to Cecil, now that he was about to lose her, she seemed each moment more desirable. He looked at her, instead of through her, for the first time since they were engaged. From a Leonardo, she had become a living woman, with mysteries and forces of her own, with qualities that even eluded art.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“Conventional, Cecil, you’re that, for you may understand beautiful things, but you don’t know how to use them; and you wrap yourself up in art and books and music, and would try to wrap up me. I won’t be stifled, not by the most glorious music, for people are more glorious, and you hide them from me.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“If a girl breaks off her engagement, everyone says: “Oh, she had someone else in her mind; she hopes to get someone else.” It’s disgusting, brutal! As if a girl can’t break it off for the sake of freedom.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“He whispered: ‘Is is this? Is this possible? I’ll put a marvel to you. That your cousin has always hoped. That from the very first moment we met, she hoped, far down in her mind, that we should be like this — of course, very far down. That she fought us on the surface, and yet she hoped. I can’t explain her any other way. Can you? Look how she kept me alive in you all the summer; how she gave you no peace; how month after month, she became more eccentric and unreliable. The sight of us haunted her — or she couldn’t have described us as she did to her friend. There are details — it burned. I read the books afterwards. She is not frozen, Lucy, she is not withered up all through. She tore us apart twice, but in the rectory that evening she was given one more chance to make us happy. We can never make friends with her or thank her. But I do believe that, far down in her heart, far below all speech and behaviour, she is glad.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“Youth enwrapped them; the song of Phaethon announced passion requited, love attained. But they were conscious of a love more mysterious than this. The song died away; they heard the river, bearing down the snows of winter into the Mediterranean.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“He whispered: ‘Is it this? Is this possible? I’ll put a marvel to you. That your cousin has always hoped. That from the very first moment we met, she hoped, far down in her mind, that we should be like this — of course, very far down. That she fought us on the surface, and yet she hoped. I can’t explain her any other way. Can you? Look how she kept me alive in you all the summer; how she gave you no peace; how month after month, she became more eccentric and unreliable. The sight of us haunted her — or she couldn’t have described us as she did to her friend. There are details — it burned. I read the books afterwards. She is not frozen, Lucy, she is not withered up all through. She tore us apart twice, but in the rectory that evening she was given one more chance to make us happy. We can never make friends with her or thank her. But I do believe that, far down in her heart, far below all speech and behaviour, she is glad.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft