Quotes from book

Sons and Lovers

“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.”

“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.”

“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--”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”