How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
A block of flats, constructed with extreme cheapness, towered on either hand. Farther down the road two more blocks were being built, and beyond these an old house was being demolished to accommodate another pair. It was the kind of scene that may be observed all over London, whatever the locality--bricks and mortar rising and falling with the restlessness of the water in a fountain, as the city receives more and more men upon her soil. Camelia Road would soon stand out like a fortress, and command, for a little, an extensive view. Only for a little. Plans were out for the erection of flats in Magnolia Road also. And again a few years, and all the flats in either road might be pulled down, and new buildings, of a vastness at present unimaginable, might arise where they had fallen. (6.6)
The changeability of the urban landscape is one of the most prominent themes of Howards End – Forster is clearly concerned about the shifting physical world of London at his moment in time. The idea that the world as we know is always undergoing transformation is both fascinating and horrifying to both the narrator and the characters.
Quote #2
London had done the mischief, said others. She had been a kind lady; her grandmother had been kind, too--a plainer person, but very kind. Ah, the old sort was dying out! (11.1)
This passage, which refers to what the villagers of Hilton think upon Mrs. Wilcox's death, indicates that a certain order is passing away – the "old sort" referred to here is a kind of Englishness, a sort of good, solid, old fashioned national character that's endangered by modern urban life.
Quote #3
Looking back on the past six months, Margaret realized the chaotic nature of our daily life, and its difference from the orderly sequence that has been fabricated by historians. Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts 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 essence is romantic beauty. (12.12)
This observation of Margaret's (then taken over and expanded on by the narrator) points to an interesting theme in this book – the idea that we can't really plan for life, for it never unfolds the way it should. Things change, but never exactly how we think they will, and no matter how prepared we are, we're never ready for them.
Quote #4
Concerts and plays swept past them, money had been spent and renewed, reputations won and lost, and the city herself, emblematic of their lives, rose and fell in a continual flux, while her shallows washed more widely against the hills of Surrey and over the fields of Hertfordshire. This famous building had arisen, that was doomed. Today Whitehall had been transformed: it would be the turn of Regent Street tomorrow. And month by month the roads smelt more strongly of petrol, and were more difficult to cross, and human beings heard each other speak with greater difficulty, breathed less of the air, and saw less of the sky. Nature withdrew: the leaves were falling by midsummer; the sun shone through dirt with an admired obscurity. (13.1)
If we're to believe the narrator, urbanization is a terrible thing; the city, though inevitable in its spread and transformation, is a negative force here that divorces humanity from Nature and everything natural with its constant, inhuman evolution.
Quote #5
The feudal ownership of land did bring dignity, whereas the modern ownership of movables is reducing us again to a nomadic horde. We are reverting to the civilization of luggage, and historians of the future will note how the middle classes accreted possessions without taking root in the earth, and may find in this the secret of their imaginative poverty. (17.2)
Here we find another comment on the ills of modern life, this time on the contemporary tendency to move around, rather than settling into a place forever. The narrator attempts to link the dullness of middle-class life with its lack of real connection to the places and things that furnish these lives.
Quote #6
"I hate this continual flux of London. It is an epitome of us at our worst--eternal formlessness; all the qualities, good, bad, and indifferent, streaming away--streaming, streaming for ever. That's why I dread it so. I mistrust rivers, even in scenery. Now, the sea--" (20.13)
Margaret is stressed out by the changing face of the city; she doesn't understand why mankind always has to demand change of itself. The metaphor of the sea, left unfinished, creates a different model – one in which the tide goes away but always returns.
Quote #7
Day and night the river flows down into England, day after day the sun retreats into the Welsh mountains, and the tower chimes, "See the Conquering Hero." But the Wilcoxes have no part in the place, nor in any place. It is not their names that recur in the parish register. It is not their ghosts that sigh among the alders at evening. They have swept into the valley and swept out of it, leaving a little dust and a little money behind. (29.25)
Wilcoxes are not made for permanence. They represent the kind of progress and change that Margaret's afraid of – they don't just settle in the same place, nor do they invest in homes the same way Mrs. Wilcox believed in Howards End, or that Margaret longs to have a house of her own forever.
Quote #8
Houses have their own ways of dying, falling as variously as the generations of men, some with a tragic roar, some quietly, but to an after-life in the city of ghosts, while from others--and thus was the death of Wickham Place--the spirit slips before the body perishes. It had decayed in the spring, disintegrating the girls more than they knew, and causing either to accost unfamiliar regions. By September it was a corpse, void of emotion, and scarcely hallowed by the memories of thirty years of happiness. (31.1)
The passing of Wickham Place is as tragic but inevitable as a human death – this description of the Schlegels moving from their childhood home is full of unease and more than a bit creepy. It contributes to the feeling of impermanence that pervades the whole text.
Quote #9
Margaret was silent. Marriage had not saved her from the sense of flux. London was but a foretaste of this nomadic civilization which is altering human nature so profoundly, and throws upon personal relations a stress greater than they have ever borne before. Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle, and the binding force that they once exercised on character must be entrusted to Love alone. May Love be equal to the task! (31.13)
Margaret thought that getting married would help her escape from the sense of things slipping away that has worried her all along, but now that she and Henry aren't settling down at Oniton, she still feels the inevitable change. Love, says Forster, is the only thing that can possibly save us all from the crumbling away of the world as we know it!
Quote #10
She lowered her eyes a moment to the black abyss of the past. They had crossed it, always excepting Leonard and Charles. They were building up a new life, obscure, yet gilded with tranquility. Leonard was dead; Charles had two years more in prison. One usen't always to see clearly before that time. It was different now. (44.10)
Margaret has finally come to accept the passing of time and the inevitable changes in her life – things are, of course, different after Leonard's death, and the new family that's emerged (Margaret, Henry, Helen, and the baby) is doing it's best to create a new life at Howards End, connected to the ancestral past (Mrs. Wilcox), but broken off from the events lost in the "black abyss" of the past year and a half.
Quote #11
"All the same, London's creeping."
She pointed over the meadow--over eight or nine meadows, but at the end of them was a red rust.
"You see that in Surrey and even Hampshire now," she continued. "I can see it from the Purbeck Downs. And London is only part of something else, I'm afraid. Life's going to be melted down, all over the world."
Margaret knew that her sister spoke truly. Howards End, Oniton, the Purbeck Downs, the Oderberge, were all survivals, and the melting-pot was being prepared for them. Logically, they had no right to be alive. One's hope was in the weakness of logic. Were they possibly the earth beating time?
"Because a thing is going strong now, it need not go strong for ever," she said. "This craze for motion has only set in during the last hundred years. It may be followed by a civilization that won't be a movement, because it will rest on the earth. All the signs are against it now, but I can't help hoping, and very early in the morning in the garden I feel that our house is the future as well as the past." (44.19-23)
Helen points out the fact that life as they know it at Howards End – which is somehow real, substantial, natural – is inevitably coming to its end with the spread of the industrial city. However, Margaret still holds out hope that the demon "civilization" can't possibly go on undefeated forever; she feels that somehow something that they have at Howards End (authentic Englishness? Nature? Or her idea of love?) will go on forever, despite the changing world.