D. H. Lawrence

“The world is a raving idiot, and no man can kill it: though I'll do my best.”

“She went to the fence and sat there, watching the gold clouds fall topieces, and go in immense, rose-coloured ruin towards the darkness. Goldflamed to scarlet, like pain in its intense brightness. Then the scarletsank to rose, and rose to crimson, and quickly the passion went out ofthe sky. All the world was dark grey. Paul scrambled quickly down withhis basket, tearing his shirt-sleeve as he did so.”

“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”

“Any inhibition must be wrong, since inevitably in the end it causes neurosis and insanity.”

“Can you never like things without clutching them as if you wanted topull the heart out of them? Why don't you have a bit more restraint, orreserve, or something?"She looked up at him full of pain, then continued slowly to stroke herlips against a ruffled flower. Their scent, as she smelled it, was somuch kinder than he; it almost made her cry.”

“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 ---”

“The only rule is, do what you really, impulsively, wish to do. But always act on your own responsibility, sincerely. And have the courage of your own strong emotion.”

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

“DEMOCRACY OF TOUCH - instead of a democracy of pocket.”

“When one is grown up, money is lying about at one's service. It is only when one is young that it is rare. Take no thought for money - that always lies to hand.(Women in Love)”

“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)”

“It was as if thousands and thousands of little roots and threads of consciousness in him and her had grown together into a tangled mass, till they could crowd no more, and the plant was dying. Now quietly, subtly, she was unravelling the tangle of his consciousness and hers, breaking the threads gently, one by one, with patience and impatience to get clear.”

“sufficient unto the moment is the appearance of reality.”

“For even satire is a form of sympathy.”

“Human love, human trust, are always perilous, because they break down. The greater the love, the greater the trust, and the greater the peril, the greater the disaster. Because to place absolute trust on another human being is in itself a disaster, both ways, since each human being is a ship that must sail its own course, even if it go in company with another ship.... And yet, love is the greatest thing between human beings.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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”

“There was a warmth of fury in his last phrases. He meant she loved him more than he her. Perhaps he could not love her. Perhaps she had not in herself that which he wanted. It was the deepest motive of her soul, this self-mistrust. It was so deep she dared neither realise nor acknowledge. Perhaps she was deficient. Like an infinitely subtle shame, it kept her always back. If it were so, she would do without him. She would never let herself want him. She would merely see.”

“Then he clambered into the boat. Oh, and the beauty of the subjection of his loins, white and dimly luminous as he climbed over the side of the boat, his back rounded and soft -ah this was too much for her, too final a vision. She knew it and it was fatal. The terrible hopelessness of fate, and of beauty, such beauty!He was not like a man to her, he was an incarnation, a great phase of life. She saw him press the water out of his face, and look at the bandage on his hand. And she knew it was all no good, and she would never go beyond him, he was the final approximation of life to her.”

“God is only a great imaginative experience.”

“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, weneither of us have.”

“what a frail, easily hurt, rather pathetic thing a human body is, naked; somehow a little unfinished, incomplete!”

“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 forthmercilessly. And she wanted to harbour her modicum of twinkling life.”

“The profoundest of all sensualitiesis the sense of truthand the next deepest sensual experienceis the sense of justice. ”

“I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.”

“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.”

“The horse, the horse! The symbol of surging potency and the power of movement, of action, in man. ”

“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...”

“no form of love is wrong, so long as it is love, and you yourself honour what you are doing. Love has an extraordinary variety of forms! And that is all there is in life, it seems to me. But I grant you, if you deny the variety of love you deny love altogether. If you try to specialize love into one set of accepted feelings, you wound the very soul of love. Love must be multi-form, else it is just tyranny, just death”

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

“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.”

“The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few in most personal experience. There's lots of good fish in the sea... maybe... but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you're not mackerel or herring yourself, you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.”

“Every civilization when it loses its inner visionand 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.”