Quotes from D.H. Lawrence

This is history. One England blots out another. The mines had made the halls wealthy. Now they were blotting them out, as they had already blotted out the cottages. The industrial England blots out the agricultural England. One meaning blots out another. The new England blots out the old England. And the continuity is not organic, but mechanical.

Une immense esprance a travers la terre', he read somewhere, and his comment was:'--and it's darned-well drowned everything worth having.

WITH SPRING CAME trouble.

It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives.

Si dice che nè i romani nè i fenici, i greci o gli arabi abbiano mai sottomesso la Sardegna. È fuori; fuori dal circuito della civiltà.

Connie felt again the tightness, niggardliness of the men of her generation. They were so tight, so scared of life!

And do you care for me?" He kissed her without answering. "Tha mun goo, let me dust thee," he said. His hand passed over the curves of her body, firmly, without desire, but with soft, intimate knowledge. As she ran home in the twilight the world seemed a dream; the trees in the park seemed bulging and surging at anchor on a tide, and the heave of the slope to the house was alive.

The cronies had such a curious pomposity under their assumed modesty. It was all so ex cathedra, and it all pretended to be so humble.

Then the individual, especially the personal man, is bourgeois: so he must be suppressed. You must submerge yourselves in the great thing, the Soviet-social thing. Even an organism is bourgeois: so the ideal must be mechanical. The only thing that is a unit, non-organic, composed of many different, and equally essential parts, is the machine. Each man a machine-part, and the driving power of the machine, hate… hate of the bourgeois. That, to me, is Bolshevism.

This Nature-sweet-and-pure business is only another effort at intellectualizing. Just an attempt to make all nature succumb to a few laws of the human mind.

For each time we lie down to sleep we have within us a body of death which dies with the day that is spent.

You can idealize or intellectualize. Or, on the contrary, you can let the dark soul in you see for itself. An artist usually intellectualizes on top, and his dark under-consciousness goes on contradicting him beneath. This is almost laughably the case with most American artists.

One may go against convention, but one must keep up tradition.

He had no particular character, having always depended on his position in society to give him position among men.

that curiously clean, semi-transparent look of the genteel, isolated poor.

America has never been easy, and is not easy to-day. Americans have always been at a certain tension. Their liberty is a thing of sheer will, sheer tension: a liberty of THOU SHALT NOT.

He could only say the one thing he was afraid to say: Will you hide in my house, master?

We are the masterless." That is what the American Eagle shrieks. It's a Hen-Eagle.

At the bottom of the American soul was always a dark suspense, at the bottom of the Spanish-American soul the same. And this dark suspense hated and hates the old European spontaneity, watches it collapse with satisfaction.

Far back, far back in our dark soul, the horse prances.

After a short time, she was not very much interested in being good. Her soul was in quest of something, which was not just being good, and doing one's best. No, she wanted something else: something that was not her ready-made duty. Everything seemed to be merely a matter of social duty, and never of her self. They talked about her soul, but somehow never managed to rouse or implicate her soul. As yet her soul was not brought in at all.

Can England die? And what if England dies?

Men are less free than they imagine; ah, far lessfree. The freest are perhaps least free.

After one inflamed evening... he shouted at her: I'll make you tremble at the sound of my footstep. It was a historical phrase in her life. She had sat down and laughed till she was quite good-humoured and merry at the idea. He had stood bursting with fury and ignominy. And, by giving her as little money as possible, by drinking much and going out with men who brutalised him and his idea of women, he paid her back.