Quotes from D.H. Lawrence

They were just as good as the men themselves, only better, since they were women.

Clifford had never been primarily out for money, though he made it where he could, for money is the seal and stamp of success.

Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste than Herman Melville.

You don't think one needs the EXPERIENCE of having been married?' she asked. 'Do you think it need BE an experience?' replied Ursula.

I don't believe in the world, not in money, nor in advancement, nor in the future of our civilization.

For him, it was not yet quite natural to express himself in speech. Gesture and grimace were instantaneous, and spoke worlds of things, if you would but accept them.

Mrs Morel was happy, bullying her clergyman over his sermons, sitting at tea with a gentleman, who passed her the bread and butter, who waited for her to begin.

And what then? What did life offer apart from the care of money? Nothing.

I want you to treat me nicely and respectfully. Call you 'sir', perhaps? she asked quietly. Yes, call me 'sir'. I should love it. Then I wish you would go upstairs, sir.

She had a curious, receptive mind, which found much pleasure and amusement in listening to other folk. She was clever in leading folk on to talk. She loved ideas, and was considered very intellectual. What she liked most of all was an argument on religion or philosophy or politics, with some educated man. This she did not often enjoy. So she always had people tell her about themselves, finding her pleasure so.

Usually he looked as if he saw things, was full of life, and warm; then his smile, like his mother's, came suddenly and was very lovable; and then, when there was any clog in his soul's quick running, his face went stupid and ugly. He was the sort of boy that becomes a clown and a lout as soon as he is not understood, or feels himself held cheap; and, again, is adorable at the first touch of warmth.

remote, virgin look of modern girls, sisters

He was, in some paralysing way, conscious of his own defencelessness, though he had all the defence of privilege. Which is curious, but a phenomenon of our day.

But both had the remote, virgin look of modern girls, sisters of Artemis rather than of Hebe.

Recklessness is almost a man's revenge on his woman. He feels he is not valued, so he will risk destroying himself to deprive her altogether.

Almost with bitterness he watched her go. She had connected him up again, when he had wanted to be alone. She had cost him that bitter privacy of a man who at last wants only to be alone.

Her still face, with the mouth closed tight from suffering and disillusion and self-denial, and her nose the smallest bit on one side, and her blue eyes so young, quick, and warm, made his heart contract with love.

And he was always aware of this fall of silence on his entry, the shutting off of life, the unwelcome. But now it was gone too far to alter.

What the eye doesn't see and the mind doesn't know, doesn't exist

Everything is sold. You don't give one heart-beat of real sympathy. And besides, who has taken away from the people their natural life and manhood, and given them this industrial horror? Who has done that?

You pluck flower after flower — it is never the flower. The flower itself — its calyx is a horrible gulf, it is the bottomless pit.

Oh, I've no patience with these romances. They're the ruin of all order. It's a thousand pities they ever happened

What liars poets and everybody were!

Odd, eccentric people they were, these entertainers. Most of them had a streak of imagination, and most of them drank. Most of them were middle-aged. Most of them had an abstracted manner; in ordinary life, they seemed left aside, somehow. Odd, extraneous creatures, often a little depressed, feeling life slip away from them. The cinema was killing them.