Source identified
Read & copy the quotation
“Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.”
- Source
- A Room with a View
- Date
- 1908
Meaning of “Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to…”
Forster’s narrator contrasts the clarity of describing another person’s life from outside with the confusion of recognizing one’s own desires while actually living them.
Where does it come from?
A Room with a View, Chapter XIV, Project Gutenberg #2641. The frozen catalog wording is a clause extract from the narrator’s longer sentence: “Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice, and we welcome ‘nerves’ or any other shibboleth that will cloak our personal desire.” The passage concerns Lucy Honeychurch’s self-deception in fiction, not modern psychological evidence.