Quotes from D. H. Lawrence

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

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...

And do you call yours a divine discontent?' 'Yes. I don't care about its divinity. But damn your happiness! So long as life's full, it doesn't matter whether it's happy or not. I'm afraid your happiness would bore me.

This is why we cannot love in the common sense. Somehow with you I cannot long be trivial, and, you know, to be always beyond this mortal state would be to lose it.

Every civilization when it loses its inner vision and 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.

a temple was never perfectly a temple, till it was ruined and mixed up with the winds and the sky and the herbs.

she was walking along the bottom-most bed--she was quite safe: quite safe, if she had to go on and on for ever, seeing this was the very bottom, and there was nothing deeper. There was nothing deeper, you see, so one could not but feel certain, passive.

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)

And they fear nothing, and they respect nothing, the young don't.

She, herself, was so forlorn and unused, not a female at all, just a mere thing of terrors.

John Thomas says good-night to Lady Jane, a little droopingly, but with a hopeful heart.

Even your joy is like a flame coming off of sadness

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

The arguments, the discussions were the great thing: the love-making and connection were only a sort of primitive reversion and a bit of an anti-climax.

Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor teaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup.

She was the flint and he the steel. But in continual striking together they only destroyed each other.

Do you think that creation depends on MAN! It merely doesn't. There are the trees and the grass and birds. I much prefer to think of the lark rising up in the morning upon a human-less world. Man is a mistake, he must go. There is the grass, and hares and adders, and the unseen hosts, actual angels that go about freely when a dirty humanity doesn't interrupt them—and good pure-tissued demons: very nice.

For she was a creature of odd whims and unsatisfied tendencies.

No creo en el mundo, ni en el dinero, ni en el progreso, ni en el futuro de nuestra civilización. Si es que la humanidad tiene un futuro, tendrá que hacerse muy diferente de como es ahora.

There had been nothing between them, and yet they had come together, exchanging their nakedness repeatedly.... She had never seen him, he had never seen her, they had met in the dark and had fought in the dark, not knowing whom they met or whom they fought. And now she saw, and turned silent in seeing. For she had been wrong. She had said he was something he was not; she had felt familiar with him. Whereas he was apart all the while, living as she never lived, feeling as she never felt.

If you don't like it, alter it. If you can't alter it, put up with it.

She was half watching, half musing. It was her constant state. Her eyes were keen and observant, but her inner mind took no notice of what she saw.

How terrible it was that it should be spring, and everything cold-hearted, cold-hearted.

Man has made such a mighty struggle to feel at home on the face of the earth, without even yet succeeding.