Quotes from D.H. Lawrence

I love you, rotten, Delicious rottenness. ...wonderful are the hellish experiences, Orphic, delicate Dionysos of the Underworld.

Mankind has got to get back to the rhythm of the cosmos.

Was his life nothing? Had he nothing to show, no work? He did not count his work, anyone could have done it. What had he known, but the long, marital embrace with his wife. Curious, that this was what his life amounted to! At any rate, it was something, it was eternal. He would say so to anybody, and be proud of it. He lay with his wife in his arms, and she was still his fulfillment, just the same as ever. And that was the be-all and the end-all. Yes, and he was proud of it.

Give up bearing children and bear hope and love and devotion to those already born.

She was not herself--she was not anything. She was something that is going to be--soon--soon--very soon. But as yet, she was only imminent.

It was cold, and he was coughing. A fine cold draught blew over the knoll. He thought of the woman. Now he would have given all he had or ever might have to hold her warm in his arms, both of them wrapped in one blanket, and sleep. All hopes of eternity and all gain from the past he would have given to have her there, to be wrapped warm with him in one blanket, and sleep, only sleep. It seemed the sleep with the woman in his arms was the only necessity.

Used to all kinds of society, she watched people as one reads the pages of a novel, with a certain disinterested amusement.

She did not understand the beauty he found in her, through touch upon her living secret body, almost the ecstasy of beauty. For passion alone is awake to it. And when passion is dead, or absent, then the magnificent throb of beauty is incomprehensible and even a little despicable; warm, live beauty of contact, so much deeper than the beauty of vision.

He worked very hard, till nothing lived in him but his eyes.

You know, he said, with an effort, 'if one person loves, the other does.' …'I hope so, because if it were not, love might be a very terrible thing,' she said. 'Yes, but it is - at least with most people,' he answered.

And yet - and yet - one's kite will rise on the wind as far as ever one has string to let it go. It tugs and tugs and will go, and one is glad the further it goes, even if everybody else is nasty about it.

Recklessness is almost a man's revenge on his woman.

the more i live, the more i realize what strange creatures human beings are. some of them might just as well have a hundred legs, like a centipede, or six, like a lobster. the human consistency and dignity one has been led to expect from one's fellow-man seem actually non-existent. one doubts if they exist to any startling degree even in oneself.

I don't want the corpses of flowers about me.

But mankind is a dead tree, covered with fine brilliant galls of people.[..]And if it is so, why is it? she asked, hostile.They were rousing each other to a fine passion of opposition. Why, why are people all balls of bitter dust?Because they won't fall off the tree when they're ripe.They hang on to their old positions when the position is over-past, till they become infested with little worms and dry-rot.

I have never seen a wild thing feel sorry for itself. A little bird will fall dead, frozen from a bough, without ever having felt sorry for itself.

I would rather sit still in a state of peace on a stone than ride in the motor-car of a multi-millionaire and feel the peacelessness of the multi-millionaire poisoning me.

A man could no longer be private and withdrawn. The world allows no hermits.

Good God, what does it matter? If life is a tragedy, or a farce, or a disaster, or anything else, what do I care! Let life be what it likes. Give me a drink, that's what I want just now.

And she shrank away again, back into her darkness, and for a long while remained blotted safely away from living.

It was the talk that mattered supremely: the impassioned exchange of talk. Love was only a minor accompaniment.

And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore, the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening.

But you don't fuck me cold-heartedly,' she protested. 'I don't want to fuck you at all.' Lady Chatterly's Lover

Can you never like things without clutching them as if you wanted to pull the heart out of them?