Quotes from D.H. Lawrence

don't be afraid—the flood will bear you to the bank and set you safe on your feet again.

Is there not the massive brilliant, out-flinging recklessness in the male soul, summed up in the sudden word: Andiamo! Andiamo! Let us go on. Andiamo!—let us go hell knows where, but let us go on. The splendid recklessness and passion that knows no precept and no school-teacher, whose very molten spontaneity is its own guide

Now my own followers will want to do me to death again, for having risen up different from their expectation.

He looked back at her. She saw his eyes, tense and brilliant, fierce, not moving. But her will had left her. A strange weight was on her limbs. she was giving way. She was giving up.

Take my words, and fling Them down on the counter roundly; See if they ring.

I love thee that I call go into thee, he said. Do you like me? she said, her heart beating. It heals it all up, that I can go into thee.

Most fatal, most hateful of all things is bullying. But what is bullying? It is a desire to superimpose my own will upon another person. Sensual bullying of course is fairly easily detected. What is more dangerous is ideal bullying. Bullying people into what is ideally good for them. I embrace for example an ideal, and[59] I seek to enact this ideal in the person of another. This is ideal bullying.

My thoughts Chink against my ribs And roll about like silver hail-stones. I should like to spill them out, And pour them, all shining, Over you. But my heart is shut upon them And holds them straitly. Come, You! and open my heart; That my thoughts torment me no longer, But glitter in your hair.

What is it then, that they want, that they are forever rampant and unsatisfied, the king of beasts and the defender of virgins? What is this Crown that hovers between them, unattainable?

He doesn't have feelings, he only has streams of words about feelings. I'm tired of self-important mentalities.

Even the real scientist works in the sense of wonder. The pity is, when he comes out of his laboratory he puts aside his wonder along with his apparatus, and tries to make it all perfectly didactic.

Hope had become almost a curse to her. She wished there need be no such thing. Ha, the torment of hoping, and the insult to one's soul.

was in the grip of his moral, mental being.

The universe isn't a spinning wheel. It is a cloud of bees flying and veering round. Thank goodness for that, for we were getting drunk on the spinning wheel.

He said he did not like her. Yet he was keen to know about her. Well, he should put himself to the test. She believed that there were in him desired for higher things, and desires for lower, and that the desire for the higher would conquer. At any rate, he should try. She forget that her 'higher' and 'lower' were arbitrary.

On every side the immense dark silence seemed pressing him, so tiny a speck, into extinction, and yet, almost nothing, he could not be extinct. Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spinning round for terror and holding each other in embrace, there in a darkness that outpassed them all and left them tiny and daunted. So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core a nothingness, and yet not nothing.

They remind me of mistletoe, which is never ours, though we wear it," said Emily to me.

The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom.

The days go by, through the brief silence of winter, when the sunshine is so still and pure, like iced wine, and the dead leaves gleam brown, and water sounds hoarse in the ravines.

He had no future in the world: of that he was conscious. He had no future in this life. Even if he lived on, it would only be a kind of enduring. But he felt the after-life belonged to him. Future in the world he could not give her. Life in the world he had not to offer her. Better go on alone. Surely better go on alone.

The true liberty will only begin when Americans discover IT, and proceed possibly to fulfill IT. IT being the deepest whole self of man, the self in its wholeness, not idealistic halfness.

We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority.

Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a third thing, that makes water and nobody knows what that is.

We don't exist unless we are deeply and sensually in touch with that which can be touched but not known.