Quotes from D.H. Lawrence

Ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.

Mr Hemingway does it extremely well. Nothing matters. Everything happens. One wants to keep oneself loose. Avoid one thing only: gettng connected up. Don't get connected up. If you get held by anything, break it. Don't be held. Break it, and get away. Don't get away with the idea of getting somewhere else. Just get away, for the sake of getting away. Beat it! "Well, boy, I guess I'll beat it." Ah, the pleasure in saying that

She was old; millions of years old, she felt. And at last, she could bear the burden of herself no more.

But he was quite consciously afraid of society, which he knew by instinct to be a malevolent, partly insane beast.

Always these arrangements! Always one's life arranged for one! Wheels that worked one and drove one, and over which one had no real control!

Her eyes were like the first morning of the world, so ageless

But a democracy is bound in the end to be obscene, for it is composed of myriad disunited fragments, each fragment assuming to itself a false wholeness, a false individuality. Modern democracy is made up of millions of frictional parts all asserting their own wholeness.

Sex is really only touch, the closest of all touch. And it's touch we're afraid of. We're only half-conscious, and half alive.

Had you noticed them before? he asked. No, never before, she replied. And now you will always see them, he said.

He would behave in the same way, say the same things, give himself completely to anybody who came along, anybody and everybody who liked to appeal to him. It was despicable, a very insidious form of prostitution.

He had so very nearly lost his life, that what remained was wonderfully precious to him.

In the depths of him, he too didn't want to go. But he was a born American, and if anything was on show, he had to see it. That was Life .

Try to love me a little more, and want me a little less.

She drops her art if anything else catches her. Her contrariness prevents her taking it seriously - she must never be serious, she feels she might give herself away. And she won't give herself away - she's always on the defensive. That's what I can't stand about her type.

Better a thousand times take one's chance with death, than accept a life one did not want.

How this darkness soaks me through and through

She was to be content to weave a steady life with him, all one fabric, but perhaps brocaded with the occasional flower of an adventure. But how could she know what she would feel next year? How could one ever know? How could one say Yes? for years and years? The little yes, gone on a breath! Why should one be pinned down by that butterfly word? Of course it had to flutter away and be gone, to be followed by other yes's and no's! Like the straying of butterflies.

It seems to me absolutely true, that our world, which appears to us the surface of all things, is really the bottom of a deep ocean: all our trees are submarine growths, and we are weird, scaly-clad submarine fauna, feeding ourselves on offal like shrimps. Only occasionally the soul rises gasping through the fathomless fathoms under which we live, far up to the surface of the ether, where there is true air.

And Clifford the same. All that talk! All that writing! All that wild struggling to push himself forwards! It was just insanity. And it was getting worse, really maniacal. Connie felt washed-out with fear. But at least, Clifford was shifting his grip from her on to Mrs Bolton. He did not know it. Like many insane people, his insanity might be measured by the things he was not aware of, the great desert tracts in his consciousness.

Nothingness! To accept the great nothingness of life seemed to be the one end of living. All the many busy and important little things that make up the grand sum-total of nothingness!

There's so much of you here with me, really, it's a pity you aren't all here.

I cannot cure myself of that most woeful of youth's follies-thinking that those who care about us will care for the things that mean much to us.

The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

I am in love - and, my God, it is the greatest thing that can happen to a man. I tell you, find a woman you can fall in love with. Do it. Let yourself fall in love. If you have not done so already, you are wasting your life.