Quotes from D.H. Lawrence

Who are the aristocrats now — who are chosen as the best to rule? Those who have money and the brains for money. It doesn't matter what else they have: but they must have money-brains — because they are ruling in the name of money." "The people elect the government," he said. "I know they do. But what are the people? Each one of them is a money-interest.

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

He crouched down, and carefully put his finger through the thorns into the round door of the nest. It's almost as if you were feeling inside the live body of the bird, he said... After that, Miriam came to see it everyday. It seemed so close to her. Again, going down the hedge side with the girl, he noticed the celandines, scalloped slashes of gold, on the side of the ditch. I like them, he said, when their petals go flat back with the sunshine. They seem to be pressing themselves at the sun.

Then he told her the budget of the day. His life-story, like an Arabian Nights, but much duller, was told night after night to his mother. It was almost as if it were her own life.

There is no such thing as liberty. The greatest liberators are usually slaves of an idea. The freest people are slaves to convention and public opinion, and more still, slaves to the industrial machine. There is no such thing as liberty. You only change one sort of domination for another. All we can do is to choose our master.

The beautiful pure freedom of a woman was infinitely more wonderful than any sexual love. The only fortunate thing was that men lagged so far behind women in the matter. They insisted on the sex thing like dogs.

It was obvious in them too that love had gone through them: that is, the physical experience. It is curious what a subtle but unmistakable transmutation it makes, both in the body of men and women: the woman more blooming, more subtly rounded, her young angularities softened, and her expression either anxious or triumphant: the man much quieter, more inward, the very shapes of his shoulders and his buttocks less assertive, more hesitant.

Ours is the universe of the unfolded rose, The explicit, The candid revelation.

Why do I like this so? Always something in his breast shrank from these close, intimate dazzled looks of hers. Why do you? he asked. I don't know - it seems so true.

And even on the Christmas roses the smuts settled persistently, incredible, like black manna from skies of doom.

They seemed so free, and were as a matter of fact so tangled and tied up, inside themselves. They seemed so dashing and unconventional, and were really so conventional, so, as it were, shut up indoors inside themselves. They looked like bold, tall young sloops, just slipping from the harbour, into the wide seas of life. And they were, as a matter of fact, two poor young rudderless lives, moving from one chain anchorage to another.

What we mean is that people may go on, keep on, and rush on, without souls. They have their ego and their will, that is enough to keep them going.

Then her eyes blazed naken in a kind of ecstasy, that frightened him.

Si rese conto, ora, che la dea-cagna del successo, aveva due grandi appetiti: uno era la fame di adulazione, di lusinghe, di carezze e moine che le davano gli artisti e gli scrittori. Ma l'altro era più feroce, era fame di carne e di ossa. E la carne e le ossa per la dea-cagna del successo, erano forniti dagli uomini che facevano denaro nelle industrie.

But alas, the cinema has taken our breath away so often, investing us in all the splendors of the splendidest American millionaire, or all the heroics and marvels of the Somme or the North Pole, that life has now no magnate richer than we, no hero nobler than we have been, on the film. Connu! Connu! Everything life has to offer is known to us, couldn't be known better, from the film.

One must strut, like a swan among geese.

He gazed at the book in his hand, did not see it for some moments, thinking of her, then saw it again.

What good was this place, this college? What good was Anglo-Saxon, when one only learned it in order to answer examination questione, in order that one should have a higher commercial value later on? She was sick with this long service at the inner commercial shrine. Yet what else was there? Was life all this, and this only? Everywhere, every- thing was debased to the same service. Everything went to produce vulgar things, to encumber material life.

Come and see what books I found you, he said. She followed him implicitly. Books did not matter to her. But he insisted on her approving. She gazed over his arm, not seeing. But she touched him.

Don't talk any more, she pleaded softly, laying her hand on his forehead. He lay quite still, almost unable to move. His body was somewhere discarded. Why not - are you tired? Yes, and it wears you out. He laughed shortly, realising. Yet you always make me like it, he said.

beat the band.

You know, love isn't the twin-soul business. With you, for instance, women are like apples on a tree. You can have one that you can reach. Those that look best are overhead, but it's no good bothering with them. So you stretch up, perhaps you pull down a bough and just get your fingers round a good one. Then it swings back and you feel wild and you say your heart's broken. But there are plenty of apples as good for you no higher than your chest.

Besides- her voice suddenly flashed into anger and contempt, it is disgusting, bits of lads and girls courting. It is not courting, he cried. I don't know what else you call it. It's not! Do you think we spoon and do? We only talk.

I look at my hands, and wonder what they are doing there. That water there ripples right through me. I'm sure that I am that rippling. It runs right through me, and I through it. There are no barriers between us... A sort of disseminates consciousness, that's all there is of me. I feel as if my body were laying empty, as if I were in the other things - clouds and water-... the individual bodily me is discarded. But if so then I am not alive here. I'm sure it would destroy me.