Lucy Honeychurch Quotes

“‘[…] have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time—beautiful?’ ‘Beautiful?’ said Miss Bartlett, puzzled at the word. ‘Are not beauty and delicacy the same?’ ‘So one would have thought,’ said [Lucy] helplessly. ‘But things are so difficult, I sometimes think.‘”

“[…] let yourself go. You are inclined to get muddled, if I may judge from last night. Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.”

“It so happened that Lucy, who found daily life rather chaotic, entered a more solid world when she opened the piano. She was then no longer either deferential or patronizing; no longer either a rebel or a slave. The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom. Lucy had done so never.”

“George served, and surprised her by his anxiety to win. She remembered how he had sighed among the tombs at Santa Croce because things wouldn’t fit; how after the death of that obscure Italian he had leant over the parapet by the Arno and said to her: ‘I shall want to live, I tell you.’ He wanted to live now, to win at tennis, to stand for all he was worth in the sun—the sun which had begun to decline and was shining in her eyes; and he did win.”

“George had turned at the sound of her arrival. For a moment he contemplated her, as one who had fallen out of heaven. He saw radiant joy in her face, he saw the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves. The bushes above them closed. He stepped quickly forward and kissed her.”

“It isn’t possible to love and to part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.”

″[…] the gates of liberty seemed still unopened. [Lucy] was conscious of her discontent; it was new to her to be conscious of it. ‘The world,’ she thought, ‘is certainly full of beautiful things, if only I could come across them.‘”

I think that you are repeating what you have heard older people say. You are pretending to be touchy; but you are not really. Stop being so tiresome, and tell me instead what part of the church you want to see. To take you to it will be a real pleasure.

“The scales fell from Lucy’s eyes. How had she stood Cecil for a moment? He was absolutely intolerable, and the same evening she broke off her engagement.”

“If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting both for us and for her.”

″‘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?’ She reflected a moment, and then said, laughing: ‘Do you know that you’re right? I do. I must be a poetess after all. When I think of you it’s always as in a room. How funny!’ To her surprise, he seemed annoyed. ‘A drawing-room, pray? With no view?’ ‘Yes, with no view, I fancy. Why not?’ ‘I’d rather,’ he said reproachfully, ‘that you connected me with the open air.‘”

“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.”

“She could not understand him; the words were indeed remote. Yet as he spoke the darkness was withdrawn, veil after veil, and she saw to the bottom of her soul.”

“About old Mr. Emerson — I hardly know. No, he is not tactful; yet, have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time — beautiful?”