Quotes from D.H. Lawrence

Oh the innocent girl in her maiden teens knows perfectly well what everything means.

The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.

The tragedy is when you've got sex in the head instead of down where it belongs.

We have lost the art of living, and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life, the science of behavior, we are complete ignoramuses. We have psychology instead.

A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it.

We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.

It's no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You've got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they've got to come. You can't force them.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it, and the journey is always towards the other soul.

She was always waiting, it seemed to be her forte.

A woman unsatisfied must have luxuries. But a woman who loves a man would sleep on a board

But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.

Nobody knows you. You don't know yourself. And I, who am half in love with you, What am I in love with? My own imaginings?

It was not the passion that was new to her, it was the yearning adoration. She knew she had always feared it, for it left her helpless; she feared it still, lest if she adored him too much, then she would lose herself, become effaced, and she did not want to be effaced, a slave, like a savage woman. She must not become a slave. She feared her adoration, yet she would not at once fight against it.

Love is never a fulfillment. Life is never a thing of continuous bliss. There is no paradise. Fight and laugh and feel bitter and feel bliss: and fight again. Fight, fight. That is life.

We fucked a flame into being.

But that is how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don't have them they hate you because you won't; and when you do have them they hate you again, for some other reason. Or for no reason at all, except that they are discontented children, and can't be satisfied whatever they get, let a woman do what she may.

Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.

I should feel the air move against me, and feel the things I touched, instead of having only to look at them. I'm sure life is all wrong because it has become much too visual - we can neither hear nor feel nor understand, we can only see. I'm sure that is entirely wrong.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze." ( Letter to Cynthia Asquith , November 1913)

There's lots of good fish in the sea...maybe...but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you're not mackerel or herring yourself, you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.