Quotes from D.H. Lawrence

you have never known either real tenderness or real sensuality: and if you do know them, with the same person, it makes a great difference.

Goodness, man, don't be so lachrymose.

No, there's something wrong with the mental life, radically. It's rooted in spite and envy, envy and spite. Ye shall know the tree by its fruit.

She had the ash of disillusion gritting under her teeth. Would the next move turn out the same? Always the shining doorway ahead; and then, upon approach, always the shining doorway was a gate into another ugly yard, dirty and active and dead. Always the crest of the hill gleaming ahead under heaven: and then, from the top of the hill only another sordid valley full of amorphous, squalid activity.

That there was any love growing between him and Miriam, neither of them would have acknowledged. He thought he was too sane for such sentimentality, and she thought herself too lofty.

He hid his face against her, who was warm and like sunlight. She seemed to have sunlight inside her. Her heart beating seemed like sunlight upon him

Still he was ambitious. He had taken to writing stories; curious, very personal stories about people he had known. Clever, rather spiteful, and yet, in some mysterious way, meaningless. The observation was extraordinary and peculiar. But there was no touch, no actual contact. It was as if the whole thing took place in a vacuum. And since the field of life is largely an artificially-lighted stage today, the stories were curiously true to modern life, to the modern psychology, that is.

She felt different from the rest of them, with their hard, easy, shallow intimacy, that seemed to cost them so little.

She saw him slender and firm, as if the setting sun had given him to her. A deep pain took hold of her, and she knew she must love him.

The crypt underneath the manor was beautiful and in perfect preservation. Paul made a drawing. Miriam stayed with him. She was thinking of Mary Queen of Scots looking with her strained hopeless eyes, that could not understand misery, over the hills where no help came, or sitting in this crypt being told of a God as cold as the place she sat in.

We fucked a flame into being. Even the flowers are fucked into being between the sun and the earth.

Why, what have I done to the children, I should like to know? But they're like yourself; you've put 'em up to your own tricks and nasty ways—you've learned 'em in it, you 'ave.

she seemed so like a wet rag that would never dry.

Paul, walking alongside, laced his fingers in the strings of the bag Miriam was carrying... the meadow was bathed in a glory of sunshine, and the path was jewelled, and it was seldom that he gave her any sign. She held her fingers very still among the strings of the bag, his fingers touching.

One is so much harder if one has a touch of the man in one, don't you think, and more able to bear things.  But I'm afraid I'm all woman.

She searched earnestly in herself to see if she wanted Paul Morel. She felt there would be some disgrace in it. Full of twisted feeling, she was afraid she did want him. She stood selfconvicted. Then came an agony of new shame. She shrank within herself in a coil of torture. Did she want Paul Morel, and did he know she wanted him? What a subtle infamy upon her! She felt as if her whole soul coiled into knots of shame.

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

He would not have it that they were lovers. The intimacy between them had been kept so abstract, such a matter of the soul, all thought and weary struggle into consciousness, that he saw it only as a Platonic friendship. He stoutly denied there was anything else between them. Miriam was silent, or else she very quietly agreed. He was a fool who did not know what was happening to himself.

Come here, and let me pin them in for you. He arranged them two or three at a time in the bosom of her dress, stepping back now and then to see the effect. You know, he said, taking the pin out of his mouth, a woman ought always to arrange her flowers before her glass. Miriam laughed. She thought flowers ought to be pinned in one's dress without any care. That Paul should take pains to fix her flowers for her was his whim.

I'd be ashamed to see a woman walking around with my name-label on her, address and railway station, like a wardrobe trunk.

That's the recoil of the same urge. The anarchist, the criminal, the murderer, he is only the extreme lover acting on the recoil. But it is love: only in recoil. It flies back, the love-urge, and becomes a horror.

Their intimacy was so abstract, he did not know he wanted to crush her onto his breast to ease the ache there. He was afraid of her. The fact that he might want her as a man wants a woman had in him been suppressed into shame.

Sometimes a good husband came along with his family, peacefully. But usually the women and children were alone.

She saw the sunshine going out of him, and she resented it.