D.H. Lawrence Quotes

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“She herself had never been able to be altogether herself: it had been denied her.”

“She had borne so long this cruelty of belonging to him and not being claimed by him.”

“It's terrible, once you've got a man into your blood!" she said.”

“How ravished one could be without ever being touched. Ravished by dead words become obscene and dead ideas become obsessions.”

“They wanted genuine intimacy, but they could not get even normally near to anyone, because they scorned to take the first steps, they scorned the triviality which forms common human intercourse.”

“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 toinstead of earn and spend, they could manage very happily…”

“As we all know, too much of any divine thing is destruction”

“You're spending your life without renewing it. You've got to be amused, properly healthily amused. You're spending your vitality without making any. Can't go on you know. Depression! Avoid depression!”

“The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one
soul, and he has got dozens.”

“They lived freely among the students, they argued with the men over philosophical, sociological and artistic matters, they were just as good as the men themselves: only better, since they were women.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“The profoundest of all sensualities
is the sense of truth
and the next deepest sensual experience
is the sense of justice.”

“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.”

“For God's sake, all of you, say spiteful things about me, then I shall know I mean something to you. Don't say surgaries, or I'm done.”

“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.”

“One could laugh at the world better if it didn't mix tender kindliness with its brutality.”

“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.”

“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.”

“You can't insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it.”

“Perhaps only those people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the world.”

“Sleep is still most perfect, in spite of hygienists, when it is shared with a beloved.”

“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.”

“you roll me out flat”

“If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly, and a Cinematograph working brightly; then I’d go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them in, all the sick, the halt, and the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile me a weary thanks; and the band would softly bubble out the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’.”

“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.”

“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.”

“Mystic equality lies in abstraction, not in having or in doing, which are processes. In function and process, one man, one part, must of necessity be subordinate to another. It is a condition of being.”

“God is only a great imaginative experience.”

“To be rid of our individuality, which is our will, which is our effort⎯⎯⎯to live effortless, a kind of curious sleep⎯⎯⎯that is very beautiful, I think; that is our after-life⎯⎯⎯our immortality.”

“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.”

“Every man has a mob self and an individual self, in varying proportions.”

“To the Puritan all things are impure, as somebody says.”

“Tragedy ought really to be a great kick at misery.”

“It was in 1915 the old world ended.”

“Folks should do their own fuckin', then they wouldn't want to listen to a lot of clatfart about another man's.”

“He talked to her endlessly about his love of horizontals: how they, the great levels of sky and land in Lincolnshire, meant to him the eternality of the will, just as the bowed Norman arches of the church, repeating themselves, meant the dogged leaping forward of the persistent human soul, on and on, nobody knows where; in contradiction to the perpendicular lines and to the Gothic arch, which, he said, leapt up at heaven and touched the ecstasy and lost itself in the divine.”

“I suppose that's what we do in death⎯⎯⎯sleep in wonder.”

“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.”

“It's the man who dares to take, who is independent, not he who gives.”

“I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.”

“The more scholastically educated a man is generally, the more he is an emotional boor.”

“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.”

“Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!”

“Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it.”

“The tiny fish enjoy themselves
in the sea.
Quick little splinters of life,
their little lives are fun to them
in the sea.”

“And dimly she realized one of the great laws of the human soul: that when the emotional soul receives a wounding shock, which does not kill the body, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is only appearance. It is really only the mechanism of the reassumed habit. Slowly, slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like a bruise, which only slowly deepens its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche. And when we think we have recovered and forgotten, it is then that the terrible after-effects have to be encountered at their worst.”