Quotes from D.H. Lawrence

Things men have made with wakened hands, and put soft life into are awake through years with transferred touch, and go on glowing for long years. And for this reason, some old things are lovely warm still with the life of forgotten men who made them.

For {she} had adopted the standard of the young: what there was in the moment was everything. And moments followed one another without necessarily belonging to one another.

They stood together in a false intimacy, a nervous contact. And he was in love with her.

you love me so much, you want to put me in your pocket. And there I will die smothered.

Sleep is still most perfect, in spite of hygienists, when it is shared with a beloved.

For God's sake, let us be men not monkeys minding machines or sitting with our tails curled while the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone. Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces.

Perhaps only those people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the world.

One could laugh at the world better if it didn't mix tender kindliness with its brutality.

She lived a good deal by herself, to herself, working, passing on from day to day, and always thinking, trying to lay hold on life, to grasp it in her own understanding. Her active living was suspended, but underneath, in the darkness, something was coming to pass. If only she could break through the last integuments!

That's how women are with me said Paul. They want me like mad but they don't want to belong to me.

You are the call and I am the answer, You are the wish, and I the fulfilment, You are the night, and I the day. What else? It is perfect enough. It is perfectly complete. You and I, What more—? Strange, how we suffer in spite of this!

And besides, look at elder flowers and bluebells-they are a sign that pure creation takes place - even the butterfly. But humanity never gets beyond the caterpillar stage -it rots in the chrysalis, it never will have wings.It is anti-creation, like monkeys and baboons.

How she hated words, always coming between her and her life: they did the ravishing, if anything did: ready-made words and phrases, sucking all the live-sap out of living things.

She looked at him, and oh, the weariness to her, of the effort to understand another language, the weariness of hearing him, attending to him, making out who he was, as he stood there fair-bearded and alien, looking at her. She knew something of him, of his eyes. But she could not grasp him. She closed her eyes.

Now go away then, and leave me alone. I don't want any more of your meretricious persiflage.

Their whole life depends on spending money, and now they've got none to spend. That's our civilization and our education: bring up the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money gives out.

But the act, called the sexual act, is not for the depositing of seed. It is for leaping off into the unknown, as from a cliff's edge, like Sappho into the sea.

She thought she loved, she thought she was full of love.

She would have thought a woman would have died of shame. Instead of which, the shame died.

Man is a mistake. He must go.

For, of course, being a girl, one's whole dignity and meaning in life consisted in the achievement of an absolute, a perfect, a pure and noble freedom. What else did a girl's life mean?

What is the knocking? What is the knocking at the door in the night? It is somebody who wants to do us harm. No, no, it is the three strange angels. Admit them, admit them.

For to desire is better than to possess, the finality of the end was dreaded as deeply as it was desired.

The beautiful pure freedom of a woman was infinitely more wonderful than any sexual love.