Quotes from D.H. Lawrence

He went down again into the darkness and seclusion of the wood. But he knew that the seclusion of the wood was illusory. The industrial noises broke the solitude, the sharp lights, though unseen, mocked it. A man could no longer be private and withdrawn. The world allows no hermits.

It's no good trying to get rid of your 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 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.

He felt he had lost it for good, he knew what it was to have been in communication with her, and to be cast off again. In misery, his heart like a heavy stone, he went about unliving.

It's just love, she said cheerfully. whatever that may be, he replied.

They looked at each other and laughed, then looked away, filled with darkness and secrecy. Then they kissed and remembered the magnificence of the night. It was so magnificent, such an inheritance of a universe of dark reality, that they were afraid to seem to remember. They hid away the remembrance and the knowledge.

For how can a man stand, unless he have something sure under his feet. Can a man tread the unstable water all his life, and call that standing? Better give in and drown at once.

Neither was in love with a young man unless he was she were verbally very near: that is unless they were profoundly interested, talking to one another. The amazing, the profound, the unbelievable thrill there was in passionately talking to some really clever young man by the hour, resuming day after day for months...

It is all possessions, possessions, bullying you and turning you into a generalisation. You must leave your surroundings sketchy, unfinished, so that you are never contained, never confined, never dominated from the outside.

And when the dawn comes creeping in, Cautiously I shall raise Myself to watch the daylight win.

Connie went for walks in the park, and in the woods that joined the park, and enjoyed the solitude and the mystery, kicked the brown leaves of autumn, and picked the primroses of spring. But it was all a dream; or rather it was like the simulacrum of reality. The oak leaves were to her like oak-leaves seen ruffling in a mirror, she herself was a figure somebody had read about, picking primroses that were only shadows or memories, or words. No substance to her or anything...no touch, no contact!

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

There was only this one lamp-post. Behind was the great scoop of darkness, as if all the night were there.

How she loved to listen when he thought only the horse could hear.

He knew that conscience was chiefly fear of society or fear of oneself.

From the old wood came an ancient melancholy, somehow soothing to her, better than the harsh insentience of the outer world. She liked the inwardness of the remnant of forest, the unspeaking reticence of the old trees. They seemed a very power of silence, and yet a vital presence. They, too, were waiting: obstinately, stoically waiting, and giving off a potency of silence.

ravished by dead words become obscene, and dead ideas become obsessions.

there is no pornography without a secrecy.

Be sure your sins will find you out, especially if you're married and her name's Bertha

The dead don't die. They look on and help.

Thank God I've got a woman! Thank God I've got a woman who is with me, and tender and aware of me. Thank God she's not a bully, nor a fool. Thank God she's a tender, aware woman.

You're always begging things to love you as if you were a beggar for love. Even the flowers, you have to fawn on them -- You don't want to love -- your eternal and abnormal craving is to be loved. You aren't positive, you're negative. You absorb, absorb, as if you must fill yourself up with love, because you've got a shortage somewhere.

But his dread was the nights when he could not sleep. Then it was awful indeed, when annihilation pressed in on him on every side. Then it was ghastly, to exist without having any life: lifeless, in the night, to exist.

Couldn't one go right away, to the far ends of the earth, and be free from it all? One could not. The far ends of the earth are not five minutes from Charing Cross. nowadays. While the wireless is active, there are no far ends of the earth.

Have I interrupted a conversation?' she asked. 'No, only a complete silence,' said Birkin. 'Oh,' said Ursula, vaguely, absent.