D.H. Lawrence Quotes

It was not the passion that was new to her, it was the yearning adoration. She knew she had always feared it, for it left her helpless; she feared it still, lest if she adored him too much, then she would lose herself, become effaced, and she did not want to be effaced, a slave, like a savage woman. She must not become a slave. She feared her adoration, yet she would not at once fight against it.

I got the blues thinking of the future so I left off and made some marmalade. It's amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges or scrub the floor.

You are the call and I am the answer,You are the wish, and I the fulfilment,You are the night, and I the day. What else? It is perfect enough. It is perfectly complete. You and I, What more—? Strange, how we suffer in spite of this!

Love is. the flower of life and blossoms unexpectedly and without law and must be plucked where it is found and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.

The young Cambridge group the group that stood for "freedom" and flannel trousers and flannel shirts open at the neck and a well-bred sort of emotional anarchy and a whispering murmuring sort of voice and an ultra-sensitive sort of manner.

Connie’s man could be a bit sulky, and Hilda’s a bit jeering. But that is how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don’t have them they hate you because you won’t; and when you do have them they hate you again, for some other reason. Or for no reason at all, except that they are discontented children, and can’t be satisfied whatever they get, let a woman do what she may.

The living self has one purpose only: to come into its own fullness of being.

I only want one thing of men, and that is, that they should leave me alone.

She, who was bored almost to agony, and who had nothing at all to do, she had not time to think even, seriously, of anything. Time being, after all, only the current of the soul in its flow.

What you intuitively desire that is possible to you.

My God, these folks don't know how to love -- that's why they love so easily.

Life is ours to be spent, not tobe saved.

He toasted his bacon on a fork and caught the drops of fat on his bread; then he put the rasher on his thick slice of bread, and cut off chunks with a clasp-knife, poured his tea into his saucer, and was happy.

The mind can assert anything and pretend it has proved it. My beliefs I test on my body on my intuitional consciousness and when I get a response there then I accept.

you roll me out flat

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

It was the talk that mattered supremely: the impassioned exchange of talk. Love was only a minor accompaniment.

Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste than Herman Melville.

While we live let us live.

I got the blues thinking of the future so I left off and made some marmalade. It's amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges and scrub the floor.

From the old wood came an ancient melancholy, somehow soothing to her, better than the harsh insentience of the outer world. She liked the inwardness of the remnant of forest, the unspeaking reticence of the old trees. They seemed a very power of silence, and yet a vital presence. They, too, were waiting: obstinately, stoically waiting, and giving off a potency of silence.

For God’s sake, let us be mennot monkeys minding machinesor sitting with our tails curledwhile the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone.Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces.

It is our business to go as we are impelled.

The young man, perched insecurely in the slen­der branches, rocked till he felt slightly drunk, reached down the boughs, where the scarlet beady cherries hung thick underneath, and tore off handful after handful of the sleek, cool-fleshed fruit. Cherries touched his ears and his neck as he stretched forward, their chill fingertips sending a flash down his blood. All shades of red, from a golden vermilion to a rich crimson, glowed and met his eyes under a dark­ness of leaves.

A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it.

Was his life nothing? Had he nothing to show, no work? He did not count his work, anyone could have done it. What had he known, but the long, marital embrace with his wife. Curious, that this was what his life amounted to! At any rate, it was something, it was eternal. He would say so to anybody, and be proud of it. He lay with his wife in his arms, and she was still his fulfillment, just the same as ever. And that was the be-all and the end-all. Yes, and he was proud of it.

Man is willing to accept woman as an equal, as a man in skirts, as an angel, a devil, a baby-face, a machine, an instrument, a bosom, a womb, a pair of legs, a servant, an encyclopaedia, an ideal or an obscenity; the one thing he won’t accept her as, is a human being, a real human being of the feminine sex.

Be as promiscuous as the rabbits!' said Hammond. 'Why not? What's wrong with rabbits? Are they any worse than a neurotic, revolutionary humanity, full of nervous hate?

There is nothing to save, now all is lost,but a tiny core of stillness in the heartlike the eye of a violet.

Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to about the same thing.

The last year of her college career was wheeling slowly round. She could see ahead her examination and her departure. She had the ash of disillusion gritting under her teeth. Would the next move turn out the same? Always the shining doorway ahead; and then, upon approach, always the shining doorway was a gate into another ugly yard, dirty and active and dead. Always the crest of the hill gleaming ahead under heaven: and then, from the top of the hill only another sordid valley full of amorphous, squalid activity.

She was always waiting, it seemed to be her forte.

They stood together in a false intimacy, a nervous contact. And he was in love with her.

One sheds ones sickness in books- repeats and presents again ones emotions, to be master of them.

The days go by, through the brief silence of winter, when the sunshine is so still and pure, like iced wine, and the dead leaves gleam brown, and water sounds hoarse in the ravines.

When one is grown up, money is lying about at one's service. It is only when one is young that it is rare. Take no thought for money - that always lies to hand.(Women in Love)

The days passed, the weeks. But everything seemed to have fused, gone into a conglomerated mass. He could not tell one day from another, hardly one place from another. Nothing was distinct or distinguishable. Often he lost himself for an hour at a time, could not remember what he had done.

It was like something lurking in the darkness within him...There is remained in the darkness, the great pain, tearing him at times, and then being silent.

Every man who is acutely alive is acutely wrestling his own soul.

Sometimes a high moon, liquid-brilliant, scudded across a hollow space and took cover under electric, brown-iridescent cloud-edges.

Aren't I enough for you?' she asked.'No,' he said. 'You are enough for me, as far as a woman is concerned. You are all women to me. But I wanted a man friend, as eternal as you and I are eternal.'(Women in Love)

It's no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You've got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they've got to come. You can't force them.

Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.

The final fact being that at the very bottom of his soul he was an outsider, and anti-social, and he accepted the fact inwardly, no matter how Bond-Streety he was on the outside. His isolation was a necessity to him; just as the appearance of conformity and mixing-in with the smart people was also a necessity.

But a democracy is bound in the end to be obscene, for it is composed of myriad disunited fragments, each fragment assuming to itself a false wholeness, a false individuality. Modern democracy is made up of millions of frictional parts all asserting their own wholeness.

The mighty question arises upon us, what is one's own real self? It certainly is not what we think we are and ought to be.

Don't you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?

On revient toujours a son premier amour." It sounds like a cynicism to-day. As if we really meant: "On ne revient jamais a son premier amour." But as a matter of fact, a man never leaves his first love, once the love is established. He may leave his first attempt at love. Once a man establishes a full dynamic communication at the deeper and higher centers, with a woman, this can never be broken. But sex in the head breaks down, and half circuits break down. Once the full circuit is established, however, this can never break.

She did not understand the beauty he found in her, through touch upon her living secret body, almost the ecstasy of beauty. For passion alone is awake to it. And when passion is dead, or absent, then the magnificent throb of beauty is incomprehensible and even a little despicable; warm, live beauty of contact, so much deeper than the beauty of vision.

That’s the place to get to—nowhere. One wants to wander away from the world’s somewheres, into our own nowhere.

Man is willing to accept woman as an equal, as a man in skirts, as an angel, a devil, a baby-face, a machine, an instrument, a bosom, a womb, a pair of legs, a servant, an encyclopaedia, an ideal or an obscenity; the one thing he won't accept her as is a human being, a real human being of the feminine sex.

Yes, I do believe in something. I believe in being warm-hearted. Ibelieve especially in being warm-hearted in love, in fucking with awarm heart. I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the womentake it warm-heartedly, everything would come all right. It's all thiscold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy.

But that is how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don't have them they hate you because you won't; and when you do have them they hate you again, for some other reason. Or for no reason at all, except that they are discontented children, and can't be satisfied whatever they get, let a woman do what she may.

Gods should be iridescent, like the rainbow in the storm. Man creates a God in his own image, and the gods grow old along with the men that made them... But the god-stuff roars eternally, like the sea, with too vast a sound to be heard.

I never knew how soothing trees are - many trees and patches of open sunlight and tree presences it is almost like having another being.

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.

She turned, and saw a great white moon looking at her over the hill. And her breast opened to it, she was cleaved like a transparent jewel to its light. She stood filled with the full moon, offering herself. Her two breasts opened to make way for it, her body opened wide like a quivering anemone, a soft, dilated invitation touched by the moon.

Can you understand how cruelly I feel the lack of friends who will believe in me a bit?

In the ancient recipe the three antidotes for dullness or boredom are sleep drink and travel. It is rather feeble. From sleep you wake up from drink you become sober and from travel you come home again. And then where are you? No the two sovereign remedies for dullness are love or a crusade.

I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.and it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self,and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can helpand patience, and a certain difficult repentancelong difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneselffrom the endless repetition of the mistakewhich mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.