How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
"One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's own emotions."
The remark fell damply on the conversation. But Helen slipped her arm round her cousin, somehow liking her the better for making it. It was not an original remark, nor had Frieda appropriated it passionately, for she had a patriotic rather than a philosophic mind. Yet it betrayed that interest in the universal which the average Teuton possesses and the average Englishman does not. It was, however illogically, the good, the beautiful, the true, as opposed to the respectable, the pretty, the adequate. It was a landscape of Böcklin's beside a landscape of Leader's, strident and ill-considered, but quivering into supernatural life. It sharpened idealism, stirred the soul. (19.8-9)
Again, we see the difference between Germans and the English, as the narrator would have us believe – Germans are somehow more interested in the passions in a way that the English are not. This might explain why Helen, the more spiritually German of the two Schlegel sisters, is more idealistic and led by her emotions.
Quote #5
"If Wilcoxes hadn't worked and died in England for thousands of years, you and I couldn't sit here without having our throats cut. There would be no trains, no ships to carry us literary people about in, no fields even. Just savagery. No--perhaps not even that. Without their spirit life might never have moved out of protoplasm. More and more do I refuse to draw my income and sneer at those who guarantee it." (19.30)
Margaret's vision of Englishness is tied up in her understanding of the Wilcoxes – to her, they are the kind of hard-working people that England is founded on, and she refuses to think poorly of them, since they enable people like Helen and herself to live the lives they're accustomed to. Helen, on the other hand, doesn't think that this should excuse them for their flaws.
Quote #6
The sense of flux which had haunted her all the year disappeared for a time. She forgot the luggage and the motor-cars, and the hurrying men who know so much and connect so little. She recaptured the sense of space, which is the basis of all earthly beauty, and, starting from Howards End, she attempted to realize England. She failed--visions do not come when we try, though they may come through trying. But an unexpected love of the island awoke in her, connecting on this side with the joys of the flesh, on that with the inconceivable. Helen and her father had known this love, poor Leonard Bast was groping after it, but it had been hidden from Margaret till this afternoon. (24.6)
It's only at Howards End that Margaret discovers a true, deep love for England – as she thinks, a "realization" of it that others have already felt. There's something about being in that place that puts her in touch more directly with her country, in a way that she's never felt before.