D.H. Lawrence citations

Page 3

“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.”

“When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.”

“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.”

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

“If we sip the wine, we find dreams coming upon us out of the imminent night”

“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 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--”

“Life is a traveling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken.”

“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.”

“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”

“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.”