The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.
D. H. LawrenceBut then peace, peace! I am so mistrustful of it: so much afraid that it means a sort of weakness and giving in.
D. H. LawrenceThe real tragedy of England, as I see it, is the tragedy of ugliness. The country is so lovely: the man-made England is so vile.
D. H. LawrenceWhere is the source of all money-sickness, and the origin of all sex-perversion?.... It lies in the heart of man, and not in the conditions.
D. H. LawrenceShe is my first, great love. She was a wonderful, rare woman - you do not know; as strong, and steadfast, and generous as the sun. She could be as swift as a white whiplash, and as kind and gentle as warm rain, and as steadfast as the irreducible earth beneath us.
D. H. Lawrencethe 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.
D. H. LawrenceThe world is a raving idiot, and no man can kill it: though Iโll do my best. But youโre right. We must rescue ourselves as best we can.
D. H. LawrenceThe real trouble about women is that they must always go on trying to adapt themselves to men's theories of women, as they alwayshave done. When a woman is thoroughly herself, she is being what her type of man wants her to be. When a woman is hysterical it's because she doesn't quite know what to be, which pattern to follow, which man's picture of woman to live up to.
D. H. LawrenceSatire exists for the purpose of killing the social being [for the sake of] the true individual, the real human being.
D. H. LawrenceI am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections. and it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill. I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self, and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help and patience, and a certain difficult repentance long difficult repentance, realization of lifeโs mistake, and the freeing oneself from the endless repetition of the mistake which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.
D. H. LawrenceMen and women should stay apart, till their hearts grow gentle towards one another again.
D. H. LawrenceWe don't exist unless we are deeply and sensually in touch with that which can be touched but not known.
D. H. LawrenceSex is our deepest form of consciousness. It is utterly non-ideal, non-mental. It is pure blood-consciousness.... It is the consciousness of the night, when the soul is almost asleep.
D. H. LawrenceI can give you a spirit love, I have given you this long, long time; but not embodied passion. See, you are a nun. I have given you what I would give a holy nun...In all our relations no body enters. I do not talk to you through the senses - rather through the spirit. That is why we cannot love in the common sense.
D. H. LawrenceBut 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.
D. H. LawrenceThe love between man and woman is the greatest and most complete passion the world will ever see, because it is dual, because it is of two opposing kinds.
D. H. LawrenceThe world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can't wake up.
D. H. LawrenceI am convinced that the air we normally breathe is a kind of water, and men and women are a species of fish.
D. H. LawrenceI believe the nearest I've come to perfect love was with a young coal-miner when I was about 16.
D. H. LawrenceBut the effort, the effort! And as the marrow is eaten out of a man's bones and the soul out of his belly, contending with the strange rapacity of savage life, the lower stage of creation, he cannot make the effort any more.
D. H. LawrenceNo absolute is going to make the lion lie down with the lamb: unless the lamb is inside.
D. H. LawrenceOne man isn't any better than another, not because they are equal, but because they are intrinsically other, that there is no termof comparison.
D. H. LawrenceThe lion shall never lie down with the lamb. The lion eternally shall devour the lamb, the lamb eternally shall be devoured. Man knows the great consummation in the flesh, the sensual ecstasy, and that is eternal. Also the spiritual ecstasy of unanimity, that is eternal. But the two are separate and never to be confused.
D. H. LawrenceI am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human race, as my spirit is part of my nation. In my own very self, I am part of my family.
D. H. LawrenceThe spirit of the place is a strange thing. Our mechanical age tries to override it. But it does not succeed. In the end the strange, sinister spirit of the place, so diverse and adverse in differing places, will smash our mechanical oneness into smithereens.
D. H. LawrenceOne doesn't know, till one is a bit at odds with the world, how much one's friends who believe in one rather generously, mean to one.
D. H. LawrenceMen fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves.
D. H. LawrenceYou 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.
D. H. LawrenceFor my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.
D. H. LawrenceThey lived freely among the students, they argued with the men over philosophical, sociological and artistic matters, they were just as good as the men themselves: only better, since they were women.
D. H. LawrenceI don't believe any more in democracy. But I can't believe in the old sort of aristocracy, either, nor can I wish it back, splendid as it was. What I believe in is the old Homeric aristocracy, when the grandeur was inside a man, and he lived in a simple wooden house.
D. H. LawrenceI'd be ashamed to see a woman walking around with my name-label on her, address and railway station, like a wardrobe trunk.
D. H. LawrenceLife and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let live, love and let love, flower and fade, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless.
D. H. LawrenceI love you, rotten, Delicious rottenness. ...wonderful are the hellish experiences, Orphic, delicate Dionysos of the Underworld.
D. H. LawrenceThe whole point about the true unconscious is that it is all the time moving forward, beyond the range of its own fixed laws or habits. It is no good trying to superimpose an ideal nature upon the unconscious.
D. H. LawrenceReligion was fading into the background. He had shovelled away all the beliefs that would hamper him, had cleared the ground, and come more or less to the bedrock of belief that one should feel inside oneself for right or wrong, and should have the patience to gradually realise one's God. Now life interested him more.
D. H. Lawrence