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And all the sky was teeming and tearing along, a vast disorder of flying shapes and darkness and ragged fumes of light and a great brown circling halo, then the terror of a moon running liquid-brilliant into the open for a moment, hurting the eyes before she plunged under cover of cloud again. -- D.h. Lawrence
Sometimes a high moon, liquid-brilliant, scudded across a hollow space and took cover under electric, brown-iridescent cloud-edges. -- D.h. Lawrence
What we want is to destroy our false, inorganic connections, especially those related to money, and re-establish the living organic connections, with the cosmos, the sun and earth, with mankind and nation and family. Start with the sun, and the rest will slowly, slowly happen. -- D.h. Lawrence
And they fear nothing, and they respect nothing, the young don't. -- D.h. Lawrence
To every man who struggles with his own soul in mystery, a book that is a book flowers once, and seeds, and is gone. -- D.h. Lawrence
If we had reverence for our life, our life would take at once religious form. But as it is, in our filthy irreverence, it remains a disgusting slough, where each one of us goes so thoroughly disguised in dirt that we are all alike and indistinguishab -- D.h. Lawrence
When love enters, the whole spiritual constitution of a man changes, is filled with the Holy Ghost, and almost his form is altered. -- D.h. Lawrence
Her lungs felt thick and slow, her mind dissolved, she felt she could cling like a bat in the long swoon of the crannied, underword darkness. Cling like a bat and sway for ever swooning in the draughts of the darkness
-- D.h. Lawrence
There's nothing wrong with sexual feelings in themselves, so long as they are straightforward and not sneaking or sly. The right sort of sex stimulus is invaluable to human daily life. Without it the world grows grey. -- D.h. Lawrence
Imitate the magnificent trees that speak no word of their rapture, but only breathe largely the luminous breeze. -- D.h. Lawrence
Sunday night meant, in the dark, wintry, rainy Midlands ... anywhere where two creatures might stand and squeeze together and spoon ... Spooning was a fine art, whereas kissing and cuddling are calf-processes. -- D.h. Lawrence
It is all possessions, possessions, bullying you and turning you into a generalisation. You must leave your surroundings sketchy, unfinished, so that you are never contained, never confined, never dominated from the outside. -- D.h. Lawrence
He felt he had lost it for good, he knew what it was to have been in communication with her, and to be cast off again. In misery, his heart like a heavy stone, he went about unliving. -- D.h. Lawrence
The peasants of Sicily, who have kept their own wheat and make their own natural brown bread, ah, it is amazing how fresh and sweet and clean their loaf seems, so perfumed, as home-made bread used all to be before the war. -- D.h. Lawrence
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! -- D.h. Lawrence
Their whole life depends on spending money, and now they've
got none to spend. That's our civilization and our education: bring up
the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money
gives out. -- D.h. Lawrence
Away with all ideals. Let each individual act spontaneously from the forever incalculable prompting of the creative wellhead within him. There is no universal law. -- D.h. Lawrence
So they won't be able to blow out my wanting you, nor the little glow there is between you and me. We'll be together next year. And though I'm frightened, I believe in your being with me. -- D.h. Lawrence
For how can a man stand, unless he have something sure under his feet. Can a man tread the unstable water all his life, and call that standing? Better give in and drown at once. -- D.h. Lawrence
Whales in mid-ocean, suspended in the waves of the sea great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies. And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their whale-tender young and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of the beginning and the end. -- D.h. Lawrence
America does to me what I knew it would do: it just bumps me. The people charge at you like trucks coming down on you
no awareness. But one tries to dodge aside in time. Bump! bump! go the trucks. And that is human contact. -- D.h. Lawrence
Life is beautiful, so long as it is consuming you. When it is rushing through you, destroying you, life is glorious. It is best to roar away, like a fire with a great draught, white-hot to the last bit. -- D.h. Lawrence
Cause-and-effect will not explain even the individuality of a single dandelion. -- D.h. Lawrence
Oh God, if the mechanism of the consciousness itself was going to go wrong, then what was one to do? Hang it all, one did one's bit! Was one to be let down absolutely? -- D.h. Lawrence
The difference between people isn't in their class, but in themselves. Only from the middle classes one gets ideas, and from the common people
life itself, warmth. You feel their hates and loves. -- D.h. Lawrence
The flood subsides, and the body, like a worn sea-shell
emerges strange and lovely. -- D.h. Lawrence
For, of course, being a girl, one's whole dignity and meaning in life consisted in the achievement of an absolute, a perfect, a pure and noble freedom. What else did a girl's life mean? -- D.h. Lawrence
And the souls in Plato riding up to heaven in a two-horse chariot would go in a Ford car now,' she -- D.h. Lawrence
The optimist builds himself safe inside a cell
and paints the inside walls sky-blue
and blocks up the door
and says he's in heaven. -- D.h. Lawrence
You'll never succeed in idealizing hard work. Before you can dig mother earth you've got to take off your ideal jacket. The harder a man works, at brute labor, the thinner becomes his idealism, the darker his mind. -- D.h. Lawrence
Men are not free when they're doing just what they like. Men are only free when they're doing what the deepest self likes. And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving. -- D.h. Lawrence
There is no evolving, only unfolding. The lily is in the bit of dust which is its beginning, lily and nothing but lily: and the lily in blossom is a ne plus ultra: there is no evolving beyond. -- D.h. Lawrence
But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions. -- D.h. Lawrence
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 orange and scrub the floor. -- D.h. Lawrence
The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul, angry or gentle. Anger is just, and pity is just, but judgement is never just. -- D.h. Lawrence
I have a very great fear of love. It is so personal. Let each bird fly with its own wings, and each fish swim its own course. - Morning brings more than love. And I want to be true to the morning. -- D.h. Lawrence
You love me so much, you want to put me in your pocket. And there I will die smothered. -- D.h. Lawrence
He's got _go_, anyhow.'
Certainly, he's got go,' said Gudrun. 'In fact I've never seen a man that showed signs of so much. The unfortunate thing is, where does his _go_ go to, what becomes of it? -- D.h. Lawrence
Messina between the volcanoes, Etna and Stromboli, having known the death-agony's terror. I always dread coming near the awful place, yet I have found the people kind, almost feverishly so, as if they knew the awful need for kindness. -- D.h. Lawrence
All human beings are vines. But especially the idealist. He is a vine, and he needs to clutch and climb. And he despises the man who is a mere potato, or turnip, or lump of wood. -- D.h. Lawrence
Why must one climb the hill ? Why must one climb? Why not stay below? Why force one's way up the slope? Why force one's way up and up, when one is at the bottom? Oh, it was very tiring, very wearying, very burdensome. Always burdens, always, always burdens. -- D.h. Lawrence
I am only half there when I am ill, and so there is only half a man to suffer. To suffer in one's whole self is so great a violation, that it is not to be endured. -- D.h. Lawrence
Tragedy looks to me like man in love with his own defeat.
Which is only a sloppy way of being in love with yourself. -- D.h. Lawrence
We make a mistake forsaking England and moving out into the periphery of life. After all, Taormina, Ceylon, Africa, America
as far as we go, they are only the negation of what we ourselves stand for and are: and we're rather like Jonahs running away from the place we belong. -- D.h. Lawrence
I'll do my life work, sticking up for the love between man and woman. -- D.h. Lawrence
Reach me a gentian, give me a torch! Let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of a flower down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark. -- D.h. Lawrence
The deadly Hydra now is the hydra of Equality. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity is the three-fanged serpent. -- D.h. Lawrence
If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule. -- D.h. Lawrence
And all the time she felt the reflection of his hopelessness in her. She couldn't quite, quite love in hoplessness. And he, being hopeless, couldn't ever love at all. -- D.h. Lawrence
I hate England and its hopelessness. I hate [Arnold] Bennett's resignation. Tragedy ought really to be a great big kick at misery. -- D.h. Lawrence
Having suffered so much, the capacity for suffering had to some extent left him. -- D.h. Lawrence
And whoever forces himself to love anybody
begets a murderer in his own body. -- D.h. Lawrence
Yea, Paris is a festive ton
a festive Ton for all! Skate o'er on joy
Thin crust of gilded, polished joy! What matters it if Hell's beneath? -- D.h. Lawrence
That was the birth of sin. Not doing it, but KNOWING about it. Before the apple, [Adam and Eve] had shut their eyes and their minds had gone dark. Now, they peeped and pried and imagined. They watched themselves. -- D.h. Lawrence
I believe that there was a great age, a great epoch when man did not make war: previous to 2000 B.C. Then the self had not reallybecome aware of itself, it had not separated itself off, the spirit was not yet born, so there was no internal conflict, and hence no permanent external conflict. -- D.h. Lawrence
The East is marvellously interesting for tracing our steps back. But for going forward, it is nothing. All it can hope for is to be fertilised by Europe, so that it can start on a new phase. -- D.h. Lawrence
Most men have a deadness in them that frightens me so because of my own deadness. Why can't men get their life straight, like St.Mawr, and then think? Why can't they think quick, mother: quick as a woman: only farther than we do? -- D.h. Lawrence
What one does in one's art, that is the breath of one's being. What one does in one's life, that is a bagatelle for the outsiders to fuss about. -- D.h. Lawrence
While the white man keeps the impetus of his own proud, onward march, the dark races will yield and serve, perforce. But let the white man once have a misgiving about his own leadership, and the dark races will at once attack him, to pull him down into the old gulfs. -- D.h. Lawrence
There was something I ought to remember: and yet I did not remember. -- D.h. Lawrence
Who knows the power that Saturn has over us, or Venus? But it is a vital power, rippling exquisitely through us all the time. -- D.h. Lawrence
Of course , if I am nothing but an ego, and woman is nothing but another ego, then there is really no vital difference between us. Two little dolls of conscious entities, squeaking when you squeeze them. And with a tiny bit of an extraneous appendage to mark which is which ... -- D.h. Lawrence
Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a third thing, that makes it water and nobody knows what that is. -- D.h. Lawrence
Humanity is less, far less than the individual, because the individual may sometimes be capable of truth, and humanity is a tree of lies. -- D.h. Lawrence
For us to go to Italy and to penetrate into Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery -- D.h. Lawrence
We do all like to get things inside a barb-wire corral. Especially our fellow-men. We love to round them up inside the barb-wire enclosure of FREEDOM, and make 'em work. Work, you free jewel, WORK! shouts the liberator, cracking his whip. -- D.h. Lawrence
The rabbit presses back her ears, Turns back her liquid, anguished eyes And crouches low: then with wild spring Spurts from the terror of his oncoming To be choked back, the wire ring Her frantic effort throttling: Piteous brown ball of quivering fears! -- D.h. Lawrence
Quite frantically, he longed not to be. -- D.h. Lawrence
The modern pantheist not only sees the god in everything, he takes photographs of it. -- D.h. Lawrence
My whole working philosophy is that the only stable happiness for mankind is that it shall live married in blessed union to woman-kind - intimacy, physical and psychical between a man and his wife. I wish to add that my state of bliss is by no means perfect. -- D.h. Lawrence
All the great words, it seemed to Connie were cancelled, for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead now and dying from day to day. -- D.h. Lawrence
there is no pornography without a secrecy. -- D.h. Lawrence
Now man cannot live without some vision of himself. But still less can he live with a vision that is not true to his inner experience and inner feeling. -- D.h. Lawrence
The shame, the roused feeling of exposure acted on his brain, made him heavy, unutterably heavy. -- D.h. Lawrence
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. -- D.h. Lawrence
Oh build your ship of death, oh build it in time and build it lovingly, and put it between the hands of your soul. -- D.h. Lawrence
Nothing but love has made the dog lose his wild freedom, to become the servant of man. -- D.h. Lawrence
Eat and carouse with Bacchus, or munch dry bread with Jesus, but don't sit down without one of the gods. -- D.h. Lawrence
For God's sake, let us be men
not monkeys minding machines
or sitting with our tails curled
while the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone.
Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces. -- D.h. Lawrence
Their words were only accidents in the mutual silence. -- D.h. Lawrence
Too much anthropos makes the world a dull hole. -- D.h. Lawrence
Isn't love the most horrible thing! I think it's just horrible. it just does one in, and turns one into a sort of howling animal. -- D.h. Lawrence
All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets,unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing. -- D.h. Lawrence
In my very own self, I am part of my family. -- D.h. Lawrence
I thought I'd done with it all. Now I've begun again."
"Begun what?"
"Life."
"Life!" she re-echoed, with a queer thrill.
"It's life," he said. "There's no keeping clear. And if you do keep clear, you might almost as well die. So if I've got to be broken open again, I have
. -- D.h. Lawrence
She was uneasy, perturbed to her last fibre. She wanted to remain clear, with no touch on her. A wild instinct made her shrink away from any hands which might be laid on her. -- D.h. Lawrence
The man who had died looked nakedly on life, and saw a vast resoluteness everywhere flinging itself up in stormy or subtle wave-crests ... always the man who had died saw not the bird alone, but the short, sharp wave of life of which the bird was the crest. -- D.h. Lawrence
It hurt her most of all, this failure to love him, -- D.h. Lawrence
The wisps of her crisp dark hair blew about her as she stooped, her eyes were big and wide and dark, when she looked up again, strange, startled, shy and sardonic at once. -- D.h. Lawrence
I'm not sure if a mental relation with a woman doesn't make it impossible to love her. To know the mind of a woman is to end in hating her. Love means the pre-cognitive flow ... it is the honest state before the apple. -- D.h. Lawrence
The true artist doesn't substitute immorality for morality. On the contrary, he always substitutes a finer morality for a grosser one. -- D.h. Lawrence
Every true artist is the salvation of every other. Only artists produce for each other a world that is fit to live in. -- D.h. Lawrence
The Brangwens had lived for generations on the Marsh Farm, in the meadows where the Erewash twisted sluggishly through alder trees, separating Derbyshire from Nottinghamshire. -- D.h. Lawrence
Men live in glad obedience to the masters they believe in, or they live in a frictional opposition to the master they wish to undermine. -- D.h. Lawrence
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. -- D.h. Lawrence
The central law of all organic life is that each organism is intrinsically isolate and single in itself. The moment its isolation breaks down, and there comes an actual mixing and confusion, death sets in. -- D.h. Lawrence
Why were we driven out of Paradise? Why did we fall into this gnawing disease of unappeasable dissatisfaction? Not because we sinned. Ah, no. All the animals in Paradise enjoyed the sensual passion of coition. Not because we sinned. But because we got sex into our head. -- D.h. Lawrence
Perhaps only those people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the world. -- D.h. Lawrence
If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge Driven by invisible blows, The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides. -- D.h. Lawrence
Marriage is the clue to human life, but there is no marriage apart from the wheeling sun and the nodding earth, from the strayingof the planets and the magnificence of the fixed stars. -- D.h. Lawrence
Now go away then, and leave me alone. I don't want any more of your meretricious persiflage. -- D.h. Lawrence
When each thing is unique in itself, there can be no comparison made ... There is only this strange recognition of present otherness. -- D.h. Lawrence
One man isn't any better than another, not because they are equal, but because they are intrinsically other, that there is no termof comparison. -- D.h. Lawrence
The goal is to know how not-to-know. -- D.h. Lawrence
Instead of her soul swaying with new life, it seemed to droop, to bleed, as if it were wounded. -- D.h. Lawrence
She had to live. It is useless to quarrel with one's bread and butter. And to expect a great deal out of life is puerile. -- D.h. Lawrence
But then peace, peace! I am so mistrustful of it: so much afraid that it means a sort of weakness and giving in. -- D.h. Lawrence
The trains roared by like projectiles level on the darkness, fuming and burning, making the valley clang with their passage. They were gone, and the lights of the towns and villages glittered in silence. -- D.h. Lawrence
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. -- D.h. Lawrence
The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance ... -- D.h. Lawrence
And she shrank away again, back into her darkness, and for a long while remained blotted safely away from living. -- D.h. Lawrence
A snake came to my water trough On a hot, hot day, and I in pajamas for the heat, To drink there. -- D.h. Lawrence
God how I hate new countries: They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like senility than anything. -- D.h. Lawrence
This speech was one of the crucial blows of Connie's life. It killed something in her. -- D.h. Lawrence
I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself -- D.h. Lawrence
I have never seen a wild thing feel sorry for itself. A little bird will fall dead, frozen from a bough, without ever having felt sorry for itself. -- D.h. Lawrence
Only this shimmeriness is the real living. The shape is a dead crust. The shimmer is inside really. -- D.h. Lawrence
Don't ask me anything about the future," he said miserably. "I don't know anything. Be with me now, will you, no matter what it is?" And she took him in her arms. -- D.h. Lawrence
And with trembling, excited hands she put the coveted stockings under Ursula's pillow.
'One gets the greatest joy of all out of really lovely stockings,' said Ursula.
'One does,' replied Gudrun; 'the greatest joy of all. -- D.h. Lawrence
But to a woman, failure is another matter. For her it means failure to live, failure to establish her own life on the face of the earth. And this is humiliating, the ultimate humiliation. -- D.h. Lawrence
It is very much easier to shatter prison-bars than to open undiscovered doors to life. -- D.h. Lawrence
Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the
lost bride and her groom. -- D.h. Lawrence
But you don't fuck me cold-heartedly,' she protested.
'I don't want to fuck you at all.'
Lady Chatterly's Lover -- D.h. Lawrence
Only she began to be afraid of the ghastly white tombstones, that peculiar loathsome whiteness of Carrara marble, detestable as false teeth, which stuck up on the hillside, under Tevershall church, and which she saw with such grim painfulness from the park. -- D.h. Lawrence
[Man's] life consists in a relation with all things: stone, earth, trees, flowers, water, insects, fishes, birds, creatures, sun,rainbow, children, women, other men. But his greatest and final relation is with the sun. -- D.h. Lawrence
Art- speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day and that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. The truth lives from day to day, and the marvelous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today. -- D.h. Lawrence
Life is beautiful, as long as it consumes you. When it is rushing through you, destroying you, life is gorgeous, glorious. It's when you burn a slow fire and save fuel, that life's not worth having. -- D.h. Lawrence
Men always do leave off really thinking, when the last bit of wild animal dies in them. -- D.h. Lawrence
Like a great bog humanity swamped her, and she sank in, weak at the knees, filled with repulsion and fear of every person she met. -- D.h. Lawrence
So long as you don't feel life's paltry and a miserable business, the rest doesn't matter, happiness or unhappiness. -- D.h. Lawrence
It is so much more difficult to live with one's body than with one's soul. One's body is so much more exacting: what it won't have it won't have, and nothing can make bitter into sweet. -- D.h. Lawrence
For my part, life is so many things I don't care what it is. It's not my affair to sum it up. Just now it's a cup of tea. This morning it was wormwood and gall. Hand me the sugar. -- D.h. Lawrence
Wisdom has reference only to the past. The future remains for ever an infinite field for mistakes. -- D.h. Lawrence
The mystery of the evening-star brilliant in silence and distance between the downward-surging plunge of the sun and the vast, hollow seething of inpouring night. The magnificence of the watchful morning-star, that watches between the night and the day, the gleaming clue to the two opposites. -- D.h. Lawrence
He reflected on the decay of mankind-the decline of the human race into folly and weakness and rottenness. 'Be a good animal, true to your animal instinct' was his motto. -- D.h. Lawrence
The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble. -- D.h. Lawrence
The only history is a mere question of one's struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do. -- D.h. Lawrence
The great pagan world of which Egypt and Greece were the last living termsonce had a vast and perhaps perfect science of itsown, a science in terms of life. In our era this science crumbled into magic and charlatanry. But even wisdom crumbles. -- D.h. Lawrence
This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. -- D.h. Lawrence
I think I am much too valuable a creature to offer myself to a German bullet gratis and for fun. -- D.h. Lawrence
To the Puritan all things are impure, as somebody says. -- D.h. Lawrence
How sure I feel, how warm and strong and happy For the future! How sure the future is within me; I am like a seed with a perfect flower enclosed ... -- D.h. Lawrence
I am sure no other civilization, not even the Romans, has showed such a vast proportion of ignominious and degraded nudity, and ugly, squalid dirty sex. Because no other civilization has driven sex into the underworld, and nudity to the W.C. -- D.h. Lawrence
Till gradually he became desperate, lost his understanding, was plunged in a revolt that knew no bounds. Inarticulate, he moved with her at the Marsh in violent, gloomy, wordless passion, almost in hatred of her. -- D.h. Lawrence
Human desire is the criterion of all truth and all good. Truth does not lie beyond humanity, but is one of the products of the human mind and feeling. There is really nothing to fear. The motive of fear in religion is base ... -- D.h. Lawrence
Sight is the least sensual of all the senses. And we strain ourselves to see, see, see
everything, everything through the eye, inone mode of objective curiosity. -- D.h. Lawrence
I never knew how soothing trees are-many trees and patches of open sunlight, and tree presences; it is almost like having another being. -- D.h. Lawrence
She is my first, great love. She was a wonderful, rare woman - you do not know; as strong, and steadfast, and generous as the sun. She could be as swift as a white whiplash, and as kind and gentle as warm rain, and as steadfast as the irreducible earth beneath us. -- D.h. Lawrence
In every great novel, who is the hero all the time? Not any of the characters, but some unnamed and nameless flame behind them all. -- D.h. Lawrence
That's how women are with me " said Paul. "They want me like mad but they don't want to belong to me. -- D.h. Lawrence
I am in love - and, my God, it is the greatest thing that can happen to a man. I tell you, find a woman you can fall in love with. Do it. Let yourself fall in love. If you have not done so already, you are wasting your life. -- D.h. Lawrence
(...) he was beginning to be himself. And now he wanted madly to be free to go on. A home, his work, and absolute freedom to move and to be, in her, with her, this was his passionate desire. He thought in a kind of ecstasy, living an hour of painful intensity. -- D.h. Lawrence
It is not woman who claims the highest in man. It is a man's own religious soul that drives him on beyond women, to his supreme activity. For his highest, man is responsible to God alone. -- D.h. Lawrence
There it was: suddenly, the tension of keeping up her appearances fell from her. Something flowed out of him physically, that made her feel inwardly at ease and happy, at home. With a woman's now alert instinct for happiness, she registered it at once. 'I'm happy when he's there!' Not -- D.h. Lawrence
Once you abstract from this, once you generalize and postulate Universals, you have departed from the creative reality, and entered the realm of static fixity, mechanism, materialism. -- D.h. Lawrence
The source of all life and knowledge is in # man and # woman , and the source of all living is in the interchange and the meeting and mingling of these two: man-life and woman-life, man-knowledge and woman-knowledge , man-being and woman-being. -- D.h. Lawrence
And can a man his own quietus make
with a bare bodkin? -- D.h. Lawrence
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. -- D.h. Lawrence
An illusion which is a real experience is worth having. -- D.h. Lawrence
The horse, the horse! The symbol of surging potency and the power of movement, of action, in man. -- D.h. Lawrence
The more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else. -- D.h. Lawrence
We need not feel ashamed of flirting with the zodiac. The zodiac is well worth flirting with. -- D.h. Lawrence
It is time that the Protestant Church, the Church of the Son, should be one again with the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of the Father. It is time that man shall cease, first to live in the flesh, with joy, and then, unsatisfied, to renounce and to mortify the flesh. -- D.h. Lawrence
I know the greatness of Christianity; it is a past greatness.. I live in 1924, and the Christian venture is done. -- D.h. Lawrence
A woman unsatisfied must have luxuries. But a woman who loves a man would sleep on a board -- D.h. Lawrence
Advertisement behind all the humility. It looked -- D.h. Lawrence
I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter. -- D.h. Lawrence
But the act, called the sexual act, is not for the depositing of seed. It is for leaping off into the unknown, as from a cliff's edge, like Sappho into the sea. -- D.h. Lawrence
And besides, look at elder flowers and bluebells-they are a sign that pure creation takes place - even the butterfly.
But humanity never gets beyond the caterpillar stage -it rots in the chrysalis, it never will have wings.It is anti-creation, like monkeys and baboons. -- D.h. Lawrence
Having achieved and accomplished love ... man ... has become himself, his tale is told. -- D.h. Lawrence
Your most vital necessity in this life is that you shall love your wife completely and implicitly and in an entire nakedness of body and spirit ... this that I tell you is my message as far as I've got any. -- D.h. Lawrence
The near touch of death may be a release into life; if only it will break the egoistic will, and release that other flow. -- D.h. Lawrence
So, after three days of incessant brandy-drinking, he had burned out the youth from his blood, he had achieved this kindled state of oneness with all the world, which is the end of youth's most passionate desire. -- D.h. Lawrence
Creatures that hang themselves up like an old rag, to sleep;
And disgustingly upside down.
Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags
And grinning in their sleep.
Bats! -- D.h. Lawrence
There is no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. -- D.h. Lawrence
When love turns into dust, money becomes the substitution. -- D.h. Lawrence
[Hawthorne's] pious blame is a chuckle of praise all the while. -- D.h. Lawrence
Every man has made a ghastly fool of himself with a woman at some time or other. -- D.h. Lawrence
A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch. -- D.h. Lawrence
One sheds ones sickness in books- repeats and presents again ones emotions, to be master of them. -- D.h. Lawrence
If it be not true to me, What care I how true it be.. Though it be not true to thee, It's gay and gospel truth to me.. -- D.h. Lawrence
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. -- D.h. Lawrence
The autumn always gets me badly, as it breaks into colours. I want to go south, where there is no autumn, where the cold doesn't crouch over one like a snow-leopard waiting to pounce. -- D.h. Lawrence
I see a redness suddenly come
Into the evening's anxious breast
'Tis the wound of love goes home! -- D.h. Lawrence
O the stale old dogs who pretend to guard
the morals of the masses,
how smelly they make the great back-yard
wetting after everyone that passes. -- D.h. Lawrence
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack. -- D.h. Lawrence
Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts. -- D.h. Lawrence
Be a good animal,true to your instincts. -- D.h. Lawrence
Recklessness is almost a man's revenge on his woman. He feels he is not valued so he will risk destroying himself to deprive her altogether. -- D.h. Lawrence
How I hate the attitude of ordinary people to life. How I loathe ordinariness! How from my soul I abhor nice simple people, with their eternal price list. It makes my blood boil. -- D.h. Lawrence
Don't be sucked in by the su-superior, don't swallow the culture bait, don't drink, don't drink and get beerier and beerier, do learn to discriminate. -- D.h. Lawrence
A young man is afraid of his demon and puts his hand over the demon's mouth sometimes and speaks for him. And the things the young man says are very rarely poetry. -- D.h. Lawrence
The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment. -- D.h. Lawrence
There is a sixth sense, the natural religious sense, the sense of wonder. -- D.h. Lawrence
Life is ours to be spent, not to
be saved. -- D.h. Lawrence
Never was an age more sentimental, more devoid of real feeling, more exaggerated in false feeling, than our own. -- D.h. Lawrence
And that is how we are. By strength of will we cut off our inner intuitive knowledge from admitted consciousness. This causes a state of dread, or apprehension, which makes the blow ten times worse when it does fall. -- D.h. Lawrence
In America the cohesion was a matter of choice and will. But in Europe it was organic. -- D.h. Lawrence
Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves. -- D.h. Lawrence
I can only see death and more death, till we are black and swollen with death. -- D.h. Lawrence
And they tramped off to the forests with sturdy youths bearing guitars, twang-twang! -- D.h. Lawrence
Love is never a fulfillment. Life is never a thing of continuous bliss. There is no paradise. Fight and laugh and feel bitter and feel bliss: and fight again. Fight, fight. That is life. -- D.h. Lawrence
So as long as you can forget your body you are happy and the moment you begin to be aware of your body, you are wretched. So if civilization is any good, it has to help us forget our bodies, and then time passes happily without our knowing it. Help us get rid of our bodies altogether. -- D.h. Lawrence
The purest lesson our era has taught is that man, at his highest, is an individual, single, isolate, alone, in direct soul-communication with the unknown God, which prompts within him. -- D.h. Lawrence
When I went to the scientific doctor
I realised what a lust there was in him to wreak his so-called science on me
and reduce me to the level of a thing.
So I said: Good-morning! and left him. -- D.h. Lawrence
We have buried so much of the delicate magic of life. -- D.h. Lawrence
One should feel inside oneself for right and wrong, and should have the patience to gradually realise one's God. -- D.h. Lawrence
Me? Oh, intellectually I believe in having a good heart, a chirpy penis, a lively intelligence, and the courage to say 'shit!' in front of a lady. -- D.h. Lawrence
I want us to be together without bothering about ourselves- to be really together because we ARE together, as if it were a phenomenon, not a thing we have to maintain by our own effort. -- D.h. Lawrence
It was the talk that mattered supremely: the impassioned exchange of talk. Love was only a minor accompaniment. -- D.h. Lawrence
Money is our madness, our vast collective madness. -- D.h. Lawrence
The Moon! Artemis! the great goddess of the splendid past of men! Are you going to tell me she is a dead lump? -- D.h. Lawrence
Sleep seems to hammer out for me the logical conclusions of my vague days, and offer them to me as dreams. -- D.h. Lawrence
You don't want to love - your eternal and abnormal craving is to be loved. You aren't positive, you're negative. You absorb, absorb, as if you must fill yourself up with love, because you've got a shortage somewhere -- D.h. Lawrence
One's action ought to come out of an achieved stillness: not to be a mere rushing on. -- D.h. Lawrence
It is not who begets us, that matters, but where fate places us. -- D.h. Lawrence
What's that as flies without wings, your ladyship? Time! Time! -- D.h. Lawrence
Why are we all only like mortal pieces of furniture? Why is nothing important? -- D.h. Lawrence
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. -- D.h. Lawrence
How to begin to educate a child. First rule: leave him alone. Second rule: leave him alone. Third rule: leave him alone. That is the whole beginning. -- D.h. Lawrence
One doesn't know, till one is a bit at odds with the world, how much one's friends who believe in one rather generously, mean to one. -- D.h. Lawrence
She looked at her roses. They were white, some incurved and holy, others expanded in an ecstacy. The tree was dark as a shadow. She lifted her hand impulsively to the flowers; she went forward and touched them in worship. -- D.h. Lawrence
Strut' said Ursula. 'One wants to strut, to be a swan among geese -- D.h. Lawrence
Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither. -- D.h. Lawrence
Patience! Patience! The world is a vast and ghastly intricacy of mechanism, and one has to be very wary, not to get mangled by it. -- D.h. Lawrence
Tragedy is like strong acid - it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth. -- D.h. Lawrence
It is so still and transcendent, the cypress trees poise like flames of forgotten darkness, that should have been blown out at the end of the summer. For as we have candles to light the darkness of night, so the cypresses are candles to keep the darkness aflame in the full sunshine. -- D.h. Lawrence
You will not easily get a man to believe that his carnal love for the woman he has made his wife is as high a love as that he feltfor his mother or sister. -- D.h. Lawrence
The mosquito knows full well, small as he is he's a beast of prey. But after all he only takes his bellyful, he doesn't put my blood in the bank. -- D.h. Lawrence
What you intuitively desire, that is possible to you. -- D.h. Lawrence
My shoes are made of Spanish leather, My socks are made of silk; I wear a ring on every finger, I wash myself in milk. -- D.h. Lawrence
The Spirit of Place [does not] exert its full influence upon a newcomer until the old inhabitant is dead or absorbed. So America ... The moment the last nuclei of Red [Indian] life break up in America, then the white men will have to reckon with the full force of the demon of the continent. -- D.h. Lawrence
The face in the bed seemed to deepen its expression of wild, but motionless distraction. Mrs Bolton looked at it and was worried. She knew what she was up against: male hysteria. She had not nursed soldiers without learning something about that very unpleasant disease. She -- D.h. Lawrence
When man has nothing but his will to assert
even his good-will
it is always bullying. Bolshevism is one sort of bullying, capitalism another: and liberty is a change of chains. -- D.h. Lawrence
With Mrs. Morel it was one of those still moments when the small frets vanish, and the beauty of things stands out, and she had the peace and the strength to see herself. -- D.h. Lawrence
And woman is the same as horses: two wills act in opposition inside her. With one will she wants to subject herself utterly. With the other she wants to bolt, and pitch her rider to perdition. -- D.h. Lawrence
When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don't know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in. -- D.h. Lawrence
A man was like a child with his appetites. A woman had to yield him what he wanted, or like a child he would probably turn nasty and flounce away and spoil what was a very pleasant connection. -- D.h. Lawrence
You must mark in these things obviously. It's the fact you want to emphasise, not the subjective impression to record. What's the fact? - red little spiky stigmas of the female flower, dangling yellow male catkin, yellow pollen flying from one to the other. Make a pictorial record of the fact, as -- D.h. Lawrence
Homer was wrong in saying, "Would that strife might pass away from among gods and men!" He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe. -- D.h. Lawrence
How ravished one could be without ever being touched. Ravished by dead words become obscene and dead ideas become obsessions. -- D.h. Lawrence
The nature of the infant is not just a new permutation-and-combination of elements contained in the natures of the parents. There is in the nature of the infant that which is utterly unknown in the natures of the parents. -- D.h. Lawrence
Special natures you must give a special world. -- D.h. Lawrence
The elephant, the huge old beast,
is slow to mate -- D.h. Lawrence
It's autumn ... and everybody feels like a disembodied spirit then. -- D.h. Lawrence
Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let live, love and let love, flower and fade, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless. -- D.h. Lawrence
Far back, far back in our dark soul the horse prances. -- D.h. Lawrence
She was always waiting, it seemed to be her forte. -- D.h. Lawrence
Oh the innocent girl in her maiden teens knows perfectly well what everything means. -- D.h. Lawrence
Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep. -- D.h. Lawrence
I am convinced that the air we normally breathe is a kind of water, and men and women are a species of fish. -- D.h. Lawrence
Whatever God there is is slowly eliminating the guts and alimentary system from the human being, to evolve a higher, more spiritual being. -- D.h. Lawrence
She drops her art if anything else catches her. Her contrariness prevents her taking it seriously - she must never be serious, she feels she might give herself away. And she won't give herself away - she's always on the defensive. That's what I can't stand about her type. -- D.h. Lawrence
Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world down to fit yourself. -- D.h. Lawrence
She did not look her best: so thin, so large-nosed, with that pink-and-white checked duster tied round her head. She felt her disadvantage. But she had had a good deal of suffering and sorrow, she did not mind any more. -- D.h. Lawrence
Sacred love is selfless, seeking not its own. The lover serves his beloved and seeks perfect communion of oneness with her. -- D.h. Lawrence
They were mere permutations of known quantities. There was no roundness or fullness in this world he now inhabited, everything was a dead shape mental arrangement, without life or being. -- D.h. Lawrence
And her soul died in her for fear: she knew she had never seen him, he had never seen her, they had met in the dark and had fought in the dark, not knowing whom they met nor whom they fought. -- D.h. Lawrence
Do not allow to slip away from you freedoms the people who came before you won with such hard knocks. -- D.h. Lawrence
I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps. -- D.h. Lawrence
We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority. -- D.h. Lawrence
I should like [people] to like the purely individual thing in themselves, which makes them act in singleness. and They only like to do the collective thing. -- D.h. Lawrence
The journey of love has been rather a lacerating, if well-worth-it, journey. -- D.h. Lawrence
Why is a door-knob deader than anything else? -- D.h. Lawrence
And yet - and yet - one's kite will rise on the wind as far as ever one has string to let it go. It tugs and tugs and will go, and one is glad the further it goes, even if everybody else is nasty about it. -- D.h. Lawrence
The novel is a perfect medium for revealing to us the changing rainbow of our living relationships. The novel can help us to live,as nothing else can: no didactic Scripture, anyhow. If the novelist keeps his thumb out of the pan. -- D.h. Lawrence
DEMOCRACY OF TOUCH - instead of a democracy of pocket. -- D.h. Lawrence
New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had. It certainly changed me forever ... The moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine high up over the deserts of Santa Fe, something stood still in my soul, and I started to attend. -- D.h. Lawrence
It is quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humor, creating him a reasonable being, yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture, and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance. -- D.h. Lawrence
The Sphinx-riddle. Solve it, or be torn to bits, is the decree. -- D.h. Lawrence
I prefer unlucky things. Luck is vulgar. Who wants what luck would bring? I don't. -- D.h. Lawrence
There is nothing to save, now all is lost,
but a tiny core of stillness in the heart
like the eye of a violet. -- D.h. Lawrence
The dead don't die. They look on and help. -- D.h. Lawrence
Time went on grey, uncloured, like a long journey where she sat unconscious as the landscape unrolled beside her. -- D.h. Lawrence
He would behave in the same way, say the same things, give himself completely to anybody who came along, anybody and everybody who liked to appeal to him. It was despicable, a very insidious form of prostitution. -- D.h. Lawrence
The world is a raving idiot, and no man can kill it: though I'll do my best. But you're right. We must rescue ourselves as best we can. -- D.h. Lawrence
When along the pavement,
Palpitating flames of life,
People flicker around me,
I forget my bereavement,
The gap in the great constellation,
The place where a star used to be -- D.h. Lawrence
I cannot be a materialist - but Oh, how is it possible that a God who speaks to all hearts can let Belgravia go laughing to a vicious luxury, and Whitechapel cursing to a filthy debauchery - such suffering, such dreadful suffering - and shall the short years of Christ's mission atone for it all? -- D.h. Lawrence
A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it. -- D.h. Lawrence
And if tonight my soul may find her peace in sleep, and sink in good oblivion, and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created. -- D.h. Lawrence
...she seemed so like a wet rag that would never dry. -- D.h. Lawrence
What a frail, easily hurt, rather pathetic thing a human body is, naked; somehow a little unfinished, incomplete! -- D.h. Lawrence
It's only when the ghastly mob-sleep, the dream helplessness of the mass psyche overcomes him, that he becomes completely base and obscene -- D.h. Lawrence
In his dark eyes was a deep misery which he wore with the same ease and pleasantness as he wore his close-sitting clothes. -- D.h. Lawrence
Along the avenue of cypresses,
All in their scarlet cloaks and surplices
Of linen, go the chanting choristers,
The priests in gold and black, the villagers ... -- D.h. Lawrence
She was walking along the bottom-most bed
she was quite safe: quite safe, if she had to go on and on for ever, seeing this was the very bottom, and there was nothing deeper. There was nothing deeper, you see, so one could not but feel certain, passive. -- D.h. Lawrence
I love Italian opera - it's so reckless. Damn Wagner, and his bellowings at Fate and death. Damn Debussy, and his averted face. I like the Italians who run all on impulse, and don't care about their immortal souls, and don't worry about the ultimate. -- D.h. Lawrence
I only want one thing of men, and that is, that they should leave me alone. -- D.h. Lawrence
I believe the nearest I've come to perfect love was with a young coal-miner when I was about 16. -- D.h. Lawrence
We assert that in all mammals the center of primal, constructive consciousness and activity lies in the middle front of the abdomen, beneath the navel, in the great nerve center called the solar plexus. How do we know? We feel it, as we feel hunger or love or hate. -- D.h. Lawrence
The living self has one purpose only: to come into its own fullness of being. -- D.h. Lawrence
Aaron Sisson was the last man on the little black railway-line -- D.h. Lawrence
For {she} had adopted the standard of the young: what there was in the moment was everything. And moments followed one another without necessarily belonging to one another. -- D.h. Lawrence
The feelings I don't have I don't have. The feelings I don't have, I won't say I have. The felings you say you have, you don't have. The feelings you would like us both to have, we neither of us have. -- D.h. Lawrence
The English people on the whole are surely the nicest people in the world, and everybody makes everything so easy for everyone else, that there is almost nothing to resist at all. -- D.h. Lawrence
America is neither free nor brave, but a land of tight, iron-clanking little wills, everybody trying to put it over everybody else, and a land of men absolutely devoid of the real courage of trust, trust in life's sacred spontaneity. They can't trust life until they can control it. -- D.h. Lawrence
Marriage and deathless friendship, both should be inviolable and sacred: two great creative passions, separate, apart, but complementary: the one pivotal, the other adventurous: the one, marriage, the centre of human life; and the other, the leap ahead. -- D.h. Lawrence
Somewhere, deep down him, he was scared, he was born scared. And those who are born with fear are natural slaves, whose profund instint leads to dread, with poisonous fear, all of those who suddenly can possibly cut loose the slave colar around their necks. -- D.h. Lawrence
If you don't like it, alter it, and if you can't alter it, put up with it. -- D.h. Lawrence
His maleness bores me. Nothing is so boring as the phallus, so inherently stupid and stupidly conceited. -- D.h. Lawrence
I like relativity and quantum theories because I don't understand them and they make me feel as if space shifted about like a swan that can't settle, refusing to sit still and be measured; and as if the atom were an impulsive thing always changing its mind. -- D.h. Lawrence
Pure morality is only an instinctive adjustment which the soul makes. -- D.h. Lawrence
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. -- D.h. Lawrence
Censors are dead men set up to judge between life and death. For no live, sunny man would be a censor, he'd just laugh. -- D.h. Lawrence
Things men have made with wakened hands, and put soft life into
are awake through years with transferred touch, and go on glowing
for long years.
And for this reason, some old things are lovely
warm still with the life of forgotten men who made them. -- D.h. Lawrence
Couldn't one go right away, to the far ends of the earth, and be free from it all?
One could not. The far ends of the earth are not five minutes from Charing Cross. nowadays. While the wireless is active, there are no far ends of the earth. -- D.h. Lawrence
Beauty is an experience, nothing else. It is not a fixed pattern or an arrangement of features. It is something felt, a glow or a communicated sense of fineness. -- D.h. Lawrence
With a woman, a man always wants to let himself go. And it is precisely with a woman that he should never let himself go ... but stick to his innermost belief and meet her just there. -- D.h. Lawrence
The spirit of the place is a strange thing. Our mechanical age tries to override it. But it does not succeed. In the end the strange, sinister spirit of the place, so diverse and adverse in differing places, will smash our mechanical oneness into smithereens. -- D.h. Lawrence
The least little bit o' money 'll really do ... What have yer done ter yerselves, wi' the blasted work? Spoilt yerselves. No need to work that much. Take yer clothes off an' look at yourselves. Yer ought ter be alive an' beautiful, an' yer ugly an' half dead. -- D.h. Lawrence
If I take my whole, passionate, spiritual and physical love to the woman who in return loves me, that is how I serve God. And my hymn and my game of joy is my work. -- D.h. Lawrence
people can be what they like and feel what they like and do what they like, strictly privately, so long as they keep the FORM of life intact, and the apparatus.' Connie -- D.h. Lawrence
Sufficient unto the moment is the appearance of reality. -- D.h. Lawrence
The pyramids of Egypt will not last a moment compared to the daisy. -- D.h. Lawrence
A house o' women is as dead as a house wi' no fire, to my thinkin'. I'm not a spider as likes to corner myself. I like a man about, if he's only something to snap at. -- D.h. Lawrence
Democracy and equality try to denythe mystic recognition of difference and innate priority, the joy of obedience and the sacred responsibility of authority. -- D.h. Lawrence
What liars poets and everybody were! They made one think one wanted sentiment. When what one supremely wanted was this piercing, consuming, rather awful sensuality. -- D.h. Lawrence
So long as you can forget your body you are happy,' said Lady Bennerley. 'And the moment you begin to be aware of your body, you are wretched. So, if civilization is any good, it has to help us to forget our bodies, and then time passes happily without our knowing it. -- D.h. Lawrence
Morality which is based on ideas, or on an ideal, is an unmitigated evil. -- D.h. Lawrence
Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer. -- D.h. Lawrence
And in this passion for understanding her soul lay close to his; she had him all to herself. But he must be made abstract first. -- D.h. Lawrence
She could hear a distant coughing of a sheep. -- D.h. Lawrence
From the unknown, profound desires enter in upon us, and ... the fulfilling of those desires is the fulfilling of creation. -- D.h. Lawrence
Gudrun entered the taxi, with the deliberate cold movement of a woman who is well-dressed and contemptuous in her soul. -- D.h. Lawrence
How terrible it was that it should be spring, and everything cold-hearted, cold-hearted. -- D.h. Lawrence
And do you call yours a divine discontent?'
'Yes. I don't care about its divinity. But damn your happiness! So long as life's full, it doesn't matter whether it's happy or not. I'm afraid your happiness would bore me. -- D.h. Lawrence
The history of our era is the nauseating and repulsive history of the crucifixion of the procreative body for the glorification ofthe spirit. -- D.h. Lawrence
One can no longer live with people: it is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease. -- D.h. Lawrence
It is a curious thing how poets tend to become ascetics ... Even a debauch for them is a self-flagellation. They go on the loose in cruelty against themselves, admitting that they are pandering to, and despising, the lower self. -- D.h. Lawrence
Her eyes were like the first morning of the world, so ageless -- D.h. Lawrence
The proper way to eat a fig, in society,
Is to split it in four, holding it by the stump,
And open it, so that it is a glittering, rosy, moist, honied, heavy-petalled four-petalled flower. -- D.h. Lawrence
Horrors might burst out of them. But something must burst out, sometimes, if men are not machines. -- D.h. Lawrence
I have lived among enough painters and around studios to have had all the theories - and how contradictory they are - rammed down my throat. A man has to have a gizzard like an ostrich to digest all the brass-tacks and wire nails of modern art theories. -- D.h. Lawrence
The world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can't wake up. -- D.h. Lawrence
I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd. -- D.h. Lawrence
I should think the American admiration of five-minute tourists has done more to kill the sacredness of old European beauty and aspiration than multitudes of bombs would have done. -- D.h. Lawrence
Men and women aren't really dogs: they only look like it and behave like it. Somewhere inside there is a great chagrin and a gnawing discontent. -- D.h. Lawrence
She lowered her eyes, and suddenly saw the fox. He was looking up at her. Her chin was pressed down, and his eyes were looking up. They met her eyes. And he knew her. She was spellbound - she knew he knew her. So he looked into her eyes, and her soul failed her. He knew her, he was not daunted. -- D.h. Lawrence
What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another. -- D.h. Lawrence
She let him come further, his lips came and surging, surging, soft, oh soft, yet on, like the powerful surge of water, irresistible, till with a little blind cry, she broke away. -- D.h. Lawrence
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. -- D.h. Lawrence
Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. -- D.h. Lawrence
No absolute is going to make the lion lie down with the lamb: unless the lamb is inside. -- D.h. Lawrence
The American grips himself, at the very sources of his consciousness, in a grip of care: and then, to so much of the rest of life, is indifferent. Whereas, the European hasn't got so much care in him, so he cares much more for life and living. -- D.h. Lawrence
The moment she entered the room where the man sat alone, waiting intensely, the thrill passed through her, she died in terror, and after the death, a great flame gushed up, obliterating her. -- D.h. Lawrence
And it seems to me a blasphemy to say that the Holy Spirit is Love. In the Old Testament it is an Eagle: in the New it is a Dove.Christ insists on the Dove: but in His supreme moments He includes the Eagle. -- D.h. Lawrence
And this is the final meaning of work: the extension of human consciousness. The lesser meaning of work is the achieving of self-preservation. -- D.h. Lawrence
Our civilisation cannot afford to let the censor-moron loose. The censor-moron does not really hate anything but the living and growing human consciousness. -- D.h. Lawrence
We must know, if only in order to learn not to know. The supreme lesson of human consciousness is to learn how not to know. That is, how not to interfere. -- D.h. Lawrence
Personality and mind, like moustaches, belong to a certain age. They are a deformity in a child ... Leave his sensibilities, his emotions, his spirit, and his mind severely alone. There is the devil in mothers, that they must provoke personalresponse from their infants. -- D.h. Lawrence
My wife has a beastly habit of comparing poetry
all literature in fact
to the droppings of the goats among the rocks
mere excreta that fertilises the ground it falls on. -- D.h. Lawrence
The world is wonderful and beautiful and good beyond one's wildest imagination. Never, never, never could one conceive what love is, beforehand, never. Life can be great-quite god-like. It can be so. God be thanked I have proved it. -- D.h. Lawrence
There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street. -- D.h. Lawrence
That's the recoil of the same urge. The anarchist, the criminal, the murderer, he is only the extreme lover acting on the recoil. But it is love: only in recoil. It flies back, the love-urge, and becomes a horror. -- D.h. Lawrence
That is almost the whole of Russian literature: the phenomenal coruscations of the souls of quite commonplace people. -- D.h. Lawrence
There is only one thing that a man really wants to do, all his life; and that is, to find his way to his God, his Morning Star, salute his fellow man, and enjoy the woman who has come the long way with him. -- D.h. Lawrence
Men don't think, high and low-alike, they take what a woman does for them for granted. -- D.h. Lawrence
The great virtue in life is real courage that knows how to face facts and live beyond them. -- D.h. Lawrence
Where is the source of all money-sickness, and the origin of all sex-perversion? ... It lies in the heart of man, and not in the conditions. -- D.h. Lawrence
A circle swoop, and a quick parabola under the bridge arches
Where light pushes through;
A sudden turning upon itself of a thing in the air.
A dip to the water. -- D.h. Lawrence
I have realized that my will, no matter how intelligent I am, is only another nuisance on the face of the earth, once I start exerting it. And other people's wills are even worse. -- D.h. Lawrence
Can you understand how cruelly I feel the lack of friends who will believe in me a bit? -- D.h. Lawrence
The search for happiness ... always ends in the ghastly sense of the bottomless nothingness into which you will inevitably fall if you strain any further. -- D.h. Lawrence
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she
sings. -- D.h. Lawrence
Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe. The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass. -- D.h. Lawrence
Isn't it god's own image? tramping his thirty miles a day
after partridges, or a little rubber ball?
wouldn't you like to be like that, well off, and quite the thing? -- D.h. Lawrence
Destroy! destroy! destroy! hums the under-consciousness. Love and produce! Love and produce! cackles the upper consciousness. And the world hears only the Love-and- produce cackle. Refuses to hear the hum of destruction under- neath. Until such time as it will have to hear. -- D.h. Lawrence
I'd be ashamed to see a woman walking around with my name-label on her, address and railway station, like a wardrobe trunk. -- D.h. Lawrence
When I wish I was rich, then I know I am ill. -- D.h. Lawrence
Any man's a fool who lets himself be a wage-earning slave, today. -- D.h. Lawrence
The nearer a conception comes towards finality, the nearer does the dynamic relation, out of which this concept has arisen, draw to a close. To know is to lose. -- D.h. Lawrence
Ah God, what has man done to man? What have the leaders of men been doing to their fellow men? They have reduced them to less than humanness; and now there can be no fellowship any more! It is just a nightmare. -- D.h. Lawrence
You don't learn algebra with your blessed soul. Can't you look at it with your clear simple wits? -- D.h. Lawrence
All this Americanising and mechanising has been for the purpose of overthrowing the past. And now look at America, tangled in her own barbed wire, and mastered by her own machines. -- D.h. Lawrence
Nobody knows you. You don't know yourself. And I, who am half in love with you, What am I in love with? My own imaginings? -- D.h. Lawrence
That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic: invisibility, and the anaesthetic power to deaden my attention in your direction. -- D.h. Lawrence
You know, he said, with an effort, 'if one person loves, the other does.'
... 'I hope so, because if it were not, love might be a very terrible thing,' she said.
'Yes, but it is - at least with most people,' he answered. -- D.h. Lawrence
Sex is the one thing you cannot really swindle; and it is the centre of the worst swindling of all, emotional swindling ... Sex lashes out against counterfeit emotion, and is ruthless, devastating against false love. -- D.h. Lawrence
I would rather sit still in a state of peace on a stone than ride in the motor-car of a multi-millionaire and feel the peacelessness of the multi-millionaire poisoning me. -- D.h. Lawrence
The weakness of modern tragedy[is that] transgression against the social code is made to bring destruction, as though the social code worked our irrevocable fate. -- D.h. Lawrence
That she bear children is not a woman's significance.
But that she bear herself,
that is her supreme and risky fate. -- D.h. Lawrence
In America the chief accusation seems to be one of "Eroticism." This is odd, rather puzzling to my mind. Which Eros? Eros of the jaunty "amours," or Eros of the sacred mysteries? And if the latter, why accuse, why not respect, even venerate? -- D.h. Lawrence
He preferred his own madness, to the regular sanity. He rejoiced in his own madness, he was free. He did not want that old sanity of the world, which was become so repulsive. He rejoiced in the new-found world of his madness. It was so fresh and delicate and so satisfying. -- D.h. Lawrence
The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind. -- D.h. Lawrence
The Italians are not passionate: passion has deep reserves. They are easily moved, and often affectionate, but they rarely have any abiding passion of any sort. -- D.h. Lawrence
She was the flint and he the steel. But in continual striking together they only destroyed each other. -- D.h. Lawrence
William had to be at his office at eight, so his mother got up at seven o' clock to prepare him. He was usually late, or on the verge of lateness. But nothing could hurry him. -- D.h. Lawrence
Be careful, then, and be gentle about death. For it is hard to die, it is difficult to go through the door, even when it opens. -- D.h. Lawrence
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. -- D.h. Lawrence
Awful things men were, savage, cruel, underneath their civilization. -- D.h. Lawrence
California is a queer place in a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific. It is absolutely selfish, very empty, but not false, and at least, not full of false effort. -- D.h. Lawrence
Not that the Red Indian will ever possess the broad lands of America. At least I presume not. But his ghost will. -- D.h. Lawrence
The beautiful pure freedom of a woman was infinitely more wonderful than any sexual love. -- D.h. Lawrence
Men and women should stay apart, till their hearts grow gentle towards one another again. -- D.h. Lawrence
Of course he had been loving Gerald all along, and all along denying it. -- D.h. Lawrence
But, Lord, if it is Thy will that I should love him, make me love him - as Christ would, who died for the souls of men. Make me love him splendidly, because he is Thy son. -- D.h. Lawrence
Hate's a growing thing like anything else. It's the inevitable outcome of forcing ideas onto life, of forcing one's deepest instincts; our deepest feelings we force according to certain ideas. -- D.h. Lawrence
One wonders what the proper high-brow Romans ... read into the strange utterances of Lucretius or Apuleius or Tertullian, Augustine or Athanasius. The uncanny voice of Iberian Spain, the weirdness of old Carthage, the passion of Libya and North Africa. -- D.h. Lawrence
A book lives as long as it is unfathomed. -- D.h. Lawrence
Naught is possessed, neither gold, nor land nor love, nor life, nor peace, nor even sorrow nor death, nor yet salvation. Say of nothing: It is mine. Say only: It is with me. -- D.h. Lawrence
Don't you think one lives for times like last night?' she said to him. 'Ay! But there's the rest o'times to think on,' he replied, rather short. They -- D.h. Lawrence
One is so much harder if one has a touch of the man in one, don't you think, and more able to bear things. But I'm afraid I'm all woman. -- D.h. Lawrence
Build then the ship of death, for you must take the longest journey, to oblivion. -- D.h. Lawrence
Only at his maximum does an individual surpass all his derivative elements, and become purely himself. And most people never get there. In his own pure individuality a man surpasses his father and mother, and is utterly unknown to them. -- D.h. Lawrence
When passion is dead, or absent, then the magnificent throb of beauty is incomprehensible and even a little despicable. -- D.h. Lawrence
A curious latency stirred in her consciousness that was not yet an idea. -- D.h. Lawrence
Another head - and a black alpaca jacket and a serviette this time - to tell us coffee is ready. Not before it is time, too. -- D.h. Lawrence
I do esteem individual liberty above everything. What is a nation for, but to secure the maximum liberty to every individual? -- D.h. Lawrence
Birkin came with Hermione. She had a rapt, triumphant look, like the fallen angels restored, yet still subtly demoniacal, now she held Birkin by the arm. And he was expressionless, neutralised, possessed by her as if it were his fate, without question. -- D.h. Lawrence
There is an eternal vital correspondence between our blood and the sun: there is an eternal vital correspondence between our nerves and the moon. If we get out of contact and harmony with the sun and moon, then both turn into great dragons of destruction against us. -- D.h. Lawrence
Where sanity is there God is. -- D.h. Lawrence
Nothing is as bad as a marriage that's a hopeless failure. -- D.h. Lawrence
The old ideals are dead as nails
nothing there. It seems to me there remains only this perfect union with a woman
sort of ultimate marriage
and there isn't anything else. -- D.h. Lawrence
Brave people add up to an aristocracy. The democracy of thou-shalt-not is bound to be a collection of weak men. -- D.h. Lawrence
We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen. -- D.h. Lawrence
Used to all kinds of society, she watched people as one reads the pages of a novel, with a certain disinterested amusement. -- D.h. Lawrence
Really! But weren't you fearfully tempted?'
'In the abstract but not in the concrete,' said Ursula. 'When it comes to the point, one isn't even tempted - oh, if I were tempted, I'd marry like a shot. I'm only tempted NOT to.' The faces of both sisters suddenly lit up with amusement. -- D.h. Lawrence
Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to the same thing. -- D.h. Lawrence
A man must keep his earnestness nimble, to escape ridicule. -- D.h. Lawrence
O pity the dead that are dead, but cannot make
the journey, still they moan and beat
against the silvery adamant walls of life's exclusive city. -- D.h. Lawrence
There was a glimmer of nightly rabbits across the ground. -- D.h. Lawrence
If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink at last, as human psychology. -- D.h. Lawrence
It grew late. Through the open door, stealthily, came the scent of madonna lilies, almost as if it were prowling abroad. -- D.h. Lawrence
I can't do with mountains at close quarters - they are always in the way, and they are so stupid, never moving and never doing anything but obtrude themselves. -- D.h. Lawrence
Whether I get on in the world is a question; but I certainly don't get on very well with the world. -- D.h. Lawrence
For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack. -- D.h. Lawrence
Go deeper than love, for the soul has greater depths, love is like the grass, but the heart is deep wild rock molten, yet dense and permanent. -- D.h. Lawrence
They were evidently small men, all wind and quibbles, flinging out their chuffy grain to us with far less interest than a farm-wife feels as she scatters corn to her fowls. -- D.h. Lawrence
She had not the strength to come to life now, in England, so foreign, skies so hostile. She knew she would die like an early, colourless, scentless flower that the end of the winter puts forth
mercilessly. And she wanted to harbour her modicum of twinkling life. -- D.h. Lawrence
Surely enough books have been written about heroines in similar circumstances. There is no need to go into the details of Alvina's six months in Islington. -- D.h. Lawrence
To penetrate into Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery-back, back down the old ways of time. Strange and wonderful chords awake in us, and vibrate again after many hundreds of years of complete forgetfulness. -- D.h. Lawrence
You can't insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it. -- D.h. Lawrence
[U]nless a woman is held, by man, safe within the bounds of belief, she becomes inevitably a destructive force. -- D.h. Lawrence
When science starts to be interpretive
it is more unscientific even than mysticism. -- D.h. Lawrence
While we live, let us live. -- D.h. Lawrence
There's a bad time coming, boys, there's a bad time coming! If things go on as they are, there's nothing lies in the future but death and destruction, for these industrial masses. -- D.h. Lawrence
Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent. -- D.h. Lawrence
Any novel of importance has a purpose. If only the "purpose" be large enough, and not at outs with the passional inspiration. -- D.h. Lawrence
I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.
(Letter to Cynthia Asquith, November 1913) -- D.h. Lawrence
If you could only tell them that living and spending isn't the same thing! But it's no good. If only they were educated to live instead of earn and spend, they could manage very happily... -- D.h. Lawrence
Man has little needs and deeper needs. We have fallen into the mistake of living from our little needs till we have almost lost our deeper needs in a sort of madness. -- D.h. Lawrence
There are vast realms of consciousness still undreamed of -vast ranges of experience, like humming of unseen harps, we know nothing of, within us. -- D.h. Lawrence
We ought to dance with rapture that we might be alive ... and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. -- D.h. Lawrence
And Venus among the fishes skips and is a she-dolphin
she is the gay, delighted porpoise sporting with love and the sea
she is the female tunny-fish, round and happy among the males
and dense with happy blood, dark rainbow bliss in the sea. -- D.h. Lawrence
I would like [the working man] to give me back books and newspapers and theories. And I would like to give him back, in return, his old insouciance, and rich, original spontaneity and fullness of life. -- D.h. Lawrence
Make him stop drinking'. He prayed every night. " 'Lord, let my father die', he prayed very often. 'Let him not be killed at pit'", he prayed when, after tea, the father did not come home from work. -- D.h. Lawrence
Behold then Septimus Dodge returning to Dodge-town victorious. Not crowned with laurel, it is true, but wreathed in lists of things he has seen and sucked dry. Seen and sucked dry, you know: Venus de Milo, the Rhine or the Coliseum: swallowed like so many clams, and left the shells. -- D.h. Lawrence
Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas! -- D.h. Lawrence
Never trust the teller, trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it. -- D.h. Lawrence
America exhausts the springs of one's soul - I suppose that's what it exists for. It lives to see all real spontaneity expire. But anyhow it doesn't grind on an old nerve as Europe seems to. -- D.h. Lawrence
The bitch-goddess, as she is called, of Success, roamed, snarling and protective, round the half-humble, half-defiant Michaelis' heels, and intimidated Clifford completely: for he wanted to prostitute himself to the bitchgoddess, Success also, if only she would have him. -- D.h. Lawrence
How she hated words, always coming between her and her life: they did the ravishing, if anything did: ready-made words and phrases, sucking all the live-sap out of living things. -- D.h. Lawrence
He had so very nearly lost his life, that what remained was wonderfully precious to him. -- D.h. Lawrence
Let there be an end ... of all this welter of pity, which is only self-pity reflected onto some obvious surface. -- D.h. Lawrence
could feel the male in him, something cold and triumphant, -- D.h. Lawrence
We have lost the art of living, and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life, the science of behavior, we are complete ignoramuses. We have psychology instead. -- D.h. Lawrence
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) -- D.h. Lawrence
Man has made such a mighty struggle to feel at home on the face of the earth, without even yet succeeding. -- D.h. Lawrence
If only there weren't so many other people in the world,' he said lugubriously. -- D.h. Lawrence
Art is a form of supremely delicate awareness ... meaning at-oneness, the state of being at one with the object. -- D.h. Lawrence
The wood was silent, still and secret in the evening drizzle of rain, full of the mystery of eggs and half-open buds, half unsheathed flowers. In the dimness of it all trees glistened naked and dark as if they had unclothed themselves, and the green things on earth seemed to hum with greenness. -- D.h. Lawrence
At a wavering instant the swallows gave way to bats
By the Ponte Vecchio ...
Changing guard. -- D.h. Lawrence
We don't exist unless we are deeply and sensually in touch with that which can be touched but not known. -- D.h. Lawrence
Exactly, I will lay down the law for nobody, not even myself. The thought of death and the afterlife saves me from doing any more ... As the thought of Eternity helps me. -- D.h. Lawrence
But then he didn't want to remember, because she had been nothing to him then, and his nature revolted from remembering her as she was when she was nothing to him. -- D.h. Lawrence
Here's to the thorn in the flower! -- D.h. Lawrence
Every civilization when it loses its inner vision
and its cleaner energy, falls into a new sort of sordidness,
more vast and more stupendous than the old savage sort.
An Augean stable of metallic filth. -- D.h. Lawrence
Nothing that comes from the deep, passional soul is bad, or can be bad. -- D.h. Lawrence
The Spanish wine, my God, it is foul, catpiss is champagne compared, this is the sulphurous urination of some aged horse. -- D.h. Lawrence
Most fatal, most hateful of all things is bullying ... Sensual bullying of course is fairly easily detected. What is more dangerous is ideal bullying. Bullying people into what is ideally good for them. -- D.h. Lawrence
Evil, what is evil? There is only one evil, to deny life As Rome denied Etruria And mechanical America Montezuma still -- D.h. Lawrence
Une immense esprance a travers la terre', he read somewhere, and his comment was:'
and it's darned-well drowned everything worth having. -- D.h. Lawrence
Morality in the novel is the trembling instability of the balance. When the novelist puts his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection, that is immorality. -- D.h. Lawrence
Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can't invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes. -- D.h. Lawrence
When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language. -- D.h. Lawrence
The mind is "ashamed" of the blood. And the blood is destroyed by the mind, actually. Hence palefaces. -- D.h. Lawrence
The only principle I can see in this life, is that one must forfeit the less for the greater. -- D.h. Lawrence
If you admit a unison, you forfeit all the possibilities of chaos ... Love is a direction which excludes all other directions. It is a freedom together, if you like. -- D.h. Lawrence
The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death. -- D.h. Lawrence
The great mass of humanity should never learn to read or write. -- D.h. Lawrence
The human consistency and dignity one has been led to expect from one's fellow-men seem actually nonexistent -- D.h. Lawrence
You've got to know yourself so you can at last be yourself. -- D.h. Lawrence
If only you could tell them that living and spending isn't the same thing. -- D.h. Lawrence
If we sip the wine, we find dreams coming upon us out of the imminent night -- D.h. Lawrence
But I will have it. I will love - it is my birthright. I will love the man I marry - that is all I care about. -- D.h. Lawrence
Now the only decent way to get something done is to get it done by somebody who quite likes doing it. -- D.h. Lawrence
Sex is really only touch, the closest of all touch. And it's touch we're afraid of. We're only half-conscious, and half-alive. We've for to come alive and aware. Especially the English have got to get into touch with one another, a bit delicate and a bit tender. It's our crying need. -- D.h. Lawrence
That which one cannot experience in daily life is not true for oneself. -- D.h. Lawrence
To be alive, to be man alive, to be whole man alive: that is the point. And at its best, the novel, and the novel supremely, can help you. It can help you not to be dead man in life. -- D.h. Lawrence
The words themselves are clean, so are the things to which they apply. But the mind drags in a filthy association, calls up some repulsive emotion. Well, then, cleanse the mind, that is the real job. It is the mind which is the Augean stables, not language. -- D.h. Lawrence
Now in November nearer comes the sun down the abandoned heaven. -- D.h. Lawrence
What is the knocking? What is the knocking at the door in the night? It is somebody who wants to do us harm. No, no, it is the three strange angels. Admit them, admit them. -- D.h. Lawrence
The unhappiness of a wife with a good husband is much more devastating than the unhappiness of a wife with a bad husband. -- D.h. Lawrence
What we mean is that people may go on, keep on, and rush on, without souls. They have their ego and their will, that is enough to keep them going. -- D.h. Lawrence
The officer sat with his long, fine hands lying on the table, perfectly still, and all his blood seemed to be corroding.
- The Prussian Officer -- D.h. Lawrence
You're always begging things to love you," he said, "as if you were a beggar for love. Even the flowers, you have to fawn on them
-- D.h. Lawrence
You, if you were sensible,
When I tell you the stars flash signals,
each one dreadful,
You would not turn and answer me
The night is wonderful. -- D.h. Lawrence
The map appears to us more real than the land. -- D.h. Lawrence
Do come back and draw the ferrets, they are the most lovely noble darlings in the world. -- D.h. Lawrence
Ours is an excessively conscious age. We know so much, we feel so little. -- D.h. Lawrence
When we really want to go for something better, we shall smash the old. Until then, any sort of proposal, or making proposals, is no more than a tiresome game for self-important people. -- D.h. Lawrence
Paris was sad. One of the saddest towns: weary of its now-mechanical sensuality, weary of the tension of money, money, money, weary even of resentment and conceit, just weary to death, and still not sufficiently Americanized or Londonized to hide the weariness under a mechanical jig-jig-jig! -- D.h. Lawrence
The acrid scents of autumn, Reminiscent of slinking beasts, make me fear -- D.h. Lawrence
That's just what a woman is. She thinks she knows what's good for a man, and she's going to see he gets it; and no matter if he's starving, he may sit and whistle for what he needs, while she's got him, and is giving him what's good for him. -- D.h. Lawrence
He who gets nearer the sun is leader, the aristocrat of aristocrats, or he who, like Dostoevsky, gets nearest the moon of our non-being. -- D.h. Lawrence
When all comes to all, the most precious element in life is wonder. Love is a great emotion, and power is power. But both love and power are based on wonder. -- D.h. Lawrence
How can any man be free without a soul of his own, that he believes in and won't sell at any price? -- D.h. Lawrence
I love trying things and discovering how I hate them. -- D.h. Lawrence
Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. -- D.h. Lawrence
Men not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass. -- D.h. Lawrence
While the black coal rose jutting round them, and the props of wood stood like little pillars in the low, black, very dark temple. -- D.h. Lawrence
The Christian fear of the pagan outlook has damaged the whole consciousness of man. -- D.h. Lawrence
I want to be gone out of myself, and you to be lost to yourself, so we are found different. -- D.h. Lawrence
Tragedy ought really to be a great kick at misery. -- D.h. Lawrence
A little morphine in all the air. It would be wonderfully refreshing for everyone. -- D.h. Lawrence
So slowly the hot elephant hearts
grow full of desire,
and the great beasts mate in secret at last,
hiding their fire. -- D.h. Lawrence
The only true aristocracy is that of consciousness. -- D.h. Lawrence
Have I interrupted a conversation?' she asked.
'No, only a complete silence,' said Birkin.
'Oh,' said Ursula, vaguely, absent. -- D.h. Lawrence
No creature is fully itself till it is, like the dandelion, opened in the bloom of pure relationship to the sun, the entire living cosmos. -- D.h. Lawrence
It is no good casting out devils. They belong to us, we must accept them and be at peace with them. -- D.h. Lawrence
If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail. -- D.h. Lawrence
She was half watching, half musing. It was her constant state. Her eyes were keen and observant, but her inner mind took no notice of what she saw. -- D.h. Lawrence
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. -- D.h. Lawrence
or less in bits. Constance, his wife, was then twenty-three years old, -- D.h. Lawrence
She felt unpeeled and rather exposed. She felt almost improper. -- D.h. Lawrence
And that is ... how they are. So terribly physically all over one another. They pour themselves one over the other like so much melted butter over parsnips. They catch each other under the chin, with a tender caress of the hand, and they smile with sunny melting tenderness into each other's face. -- D.h. Lawrence
The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute. -- D.h. Lawrence
Shall I tell you what you have that other men don't? ... It's the courage of your own tenderness. -- D.h. Lawrence
But the effort, the effort! And as the marrow is eaten out of a man's bones and the soul out of his belly, contending with the strange rapacity of savage life, the lower stage of creation, he cannot make the effort any more. -- D.h. Lawrence
It always seemed to me that men wore their beards, like they wear their neckties, for show. -- D.h. Lawrence
Unless one decorates one's house for oneself alone, best leave it bare, for other people are walleyed. -- D.h. Lawrence
Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art - or almost the only stuff. -- D.h. Lawrence
Obscenity only comes in when the mind despises and fears the body, and the body hates and resists the mind. -- D.h. Lawrence
I don't believe any more in democracy. But I can't believe in the old sort of aristocracy, either, nor can I wish it back, splendid as it was. What I believe in is the old Homeric aristocracy, when the grandeur was inside a man, and he lived in a simple wooden house. -- D.h. Lawrence
Till she seemed to swoon, gradually her mind went, and she passed away, everything in her was melted down and fluid, and she lay still, become contained by him, sleeping in him as lightning sleeps in a pure, soft stone. -- D.h. Lawrence
If only we could live two lives: the first in which to make one's mistakes, and the second in which to profit by them. -- D.h. Lawrence
We are dying, we are dying, we are all of us dying
and nothing will stay the death-flood rising within us
and soon it will rise on the world, on the outside world. -- D.h. Lawrence
The great home of the soul is the open road. -- D.h. Lawrence
The long, slow, enduring thing ... that's what we live by ... not the occasional spasm of any sort. Little by little, living together, two people fall into a sort of unison, they vibrate so intricately to one another. -- D.h. Lawrence
Only youth has a taste of immortality. -- D.h. Lawrence
Yet he was tense, feeling that he and the elderly, estranged woman were conferring together like traitors, like enemies within the camp of the other people. -- D.h. Lawrence
To him now, life seemed a shadow, day a white shadow; night, and death, and stillness, and inaction, this seemed like BEING. To be alive, to be urgent and insistent
that was NOT-TO-BE. The highest of all was to melt out into the darkness and sway there, identified with the great Being. -- D.h. Lawrence
Sleep is still most perfect, in spite of hygienists, when it is shared with a beloved. The warmth, the security and peace of soul, the utter comfort from the touch of the other, knits the sleep, so that it takes the body and soul completely in its healing. -- D.h. Lawrence
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. -- D.h. Lawrence
If I were the moon, I know where I would fall down. -- D.h. Lawrence
Why doesn't the past decently bury itself, instead of sitting waiting to be admired by the present? -- D.h. Lawrence
Every man has a mob self and an individual self, in varying proportions. -- D.h. Lawrence
Lemon trees, like Italians, seem to be happiest when they are touching one another -- D.h. Lawrence
For whereas the mind works in possibilities, the intuitions work in actualities, and what you intuitively desire, that is possible to you. Whereas what you mentally or "consciously" desire is nine times out of ten impossible; hitch your wagon to a star, or you will just stay where you are. -- D.h. Lawrence
Sex is just another form of talk, where you act the words instead of saying them. -- D.h. Lawrence
Where the electron behaves and misbehaves as it will, where the forces tie themselves up into knots of atoms and come united ... -- D.h. Lawrence
I want the wonder back again, or I shall die. -- D.h. Lawrence
Be sure your sins will find you out, especially if you're married and her name's Bertha -- D.h. Lawrence
It's astonishing how Lesbian women are, consciously or unconsciously. Seems to me they're nearly all Lesbian." "And -- D.h. Lawrence
Sanity means the wholeness of the consciousness. And our society is only part conscious, like an idiot. -- D.h. Lawrence
I'd wipe the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake. -- D.h. Lawrence
Connie went away completely bewildered. She was not sure whether she had been insulted and mortally offended, or not. -- D.h. Lawrence
You must always be a-waggle with LOVE. -- D.h. Lawrence
The great living experience for every man is his adventure into the woman. The man embraces in the woman all that is not himself, and from that one resultant, from that embrace, comes every new action. -- D.h. Lawrence