Quotes from D.H. Lawrence

Quite frantically, he longed not to be.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habits, to have new little hopes.

Chimaera Most people, today, are chimaera chimerical: just fantasies of self-importance their own self-importance and sphinxes of self-consciousness.

Any man's a fool who lets himself be a wage-earning slave, today.

He seemed so old...endlessly old, built up of layers of disillusion, going down in him generation after generation, like geological strata; and at the same time he was forlorn like a child. An outcast, in a certain sense; but with the desperate bravery of his rat-like existence.

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can grow wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes, and says, is always true.

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.

Shame, what was it? It was part of extreme delight. It was that part of delight of which man is usually afraid. Why afraid? The secret, shameful things are most terribly beautiful.

And however one might sentimentalize it, this sex business was one of the most ancient, sordid connections and subjections. Poets who glorified it were mostly men. Women had always known there was something better, something higher.

Yet he was tense, feeling that he and the elderly, estranged woman were conferring together like traitors, like enemies within the camp of the other people.

In sleep, you dream, in drink you curse, and in travel you yell at a porter. No, work and love are the two. When you're not at work you should be in love.' 'Be

But the most important harvest, after gleaning for frumenty, was the blackberries.

I believe in having a good heart, a chirpy penis, a lively intelligence, and the courage to say shit! in front of a lady.

Here's to the thorn in the flower!

Lemon trees, like Italians, seem to be happiest when they are touching one another

You must mark in these things obviously. It's the fact you want to emphasise, not the subjective impression to record. What's the fact?—red little spiky stigmas of the female flower, dangling yellow male catkin, yellow pollen flying from one to the other. Make a pictorial record of the fact, as

Life is beautiful, so long as it is consuming you. When it is rushing through you, destroying you, life is glorious. It is best to roar away, like a fire with a great draught, white-hot to the last bit. It's when you burn a slow fire and save fuel that life's not worth having.

He knew his heart's core was a fat, awful worm. His dread was lest anyone else should know. His anguish of hate was against anyone who knew, and recoiled.

You can't lose yourself, neither in woman nor humanity nor in God. You've always got yourself on your hands in the end: and a very raw and jaded and humiliated and nervous-neurasthenic self it is, too, in the end.

He felt a sort of emptiness, almost like a vacuum in his soul. He was unsettled and restless.

sun is anti-thought

Messina between the volcanoes, Etna and Stromboli, having known the death-agony's terror. I always dread coming near the awful place, yet I have found the people kind, almost feverishly so, as if they knew the awful need for kindness.

You live most intensely in human contact- and that's what we shrink from, poor timid creatures, from giving our souls to somebody to touch; for they, bungling fools, will generally paw it with dirty hands

You've got very badly to want to get rid of the old, before anything new will appear — even in the self.