Quotes from book

Women in Love

“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.”

“But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.”

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

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

“Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world down to fit yourself.”

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

“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.”

“Every true artist is the salvation of every other. Only artists produce for each other a world that is fit to live in.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Humanity is a huge aggregate lie, and a huge lie is less than a small truth. Humanity is less, far less than the individual, because the individual may sometimes be capable of truth, and humanity is a tree of lies. And they say that love is the greatest thing; they persist in SAYING this, the foul liars, and just look at what they do! Look at all the millions of people who repeat every minute that love is the greatest, and charity is the greatest— and see what they are doing all the time. By their works ye shall know them, for dirty liars and cowards, who daren't stand by their own actions, much less by their own words.”