116 Quotes & Sayings By Dh Lawrence

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? D.h. Lawrence

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. . D.h. Lawrence

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

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. D.h. Lawrence

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. D.h. Lawrence

This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women. There is my creed. . D.h. Lawrence

Human desire is the criterion of all truth and all good. Truth does not lie beyond humanity, but is one of the products of the human mind and feeling. There is really nothing to fear. The motive of fear in religion is base... D.h. Lawrence

Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. D.h. Lawrence

There was a warmth of fury in his last phrases. He meant she loved him more than he her. Perhaps he could not love her. Perhaps she had not in herself that which he wanted. It was the deepest motive of her soul, this self-mistrust. It was so deep she dared neither realise nor acknowledge. Perhaps she was deficient. Like an infinitely subtle shame, it kept her always back. If it were so, she would do without him. She would never let herself want him. She would merely see. D.h. Lawrence

We are so overwhelmed with quantities of books, that we hardly realize any more that a book can be valuable, valuable like a jewel, or a lovely picture, into which you can look deeper and deeper and get a more profound experience very time. It is far, far better to read one book six times, at intervals, than to read six several books. D.h. Lawrence

Aren't I enough for you?' she asked.' No, ' he said. 'You are enough for me, as far as a woman is concerned. You are all women to me. But I wanted a man friend, as eternal as you and I are eternal.'( Women in Love) D.h. Lawrence

Of course , if I am nothing but an ego, and woman is nothing but another ego, then there is really no vital difference between us. Two little dolls of conscious entities, squeaking when you squeeze them. And with a tiny bit of an extraneous appendage to mark which is which... D.h. Lawrence

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. D.h. Lawrence

It seems to me absolutely true, that our world, which appears to us the surface of all things, is really the bottom of a deep ocean: all our trees are submarine growths, and we are weird, scaly-clad submarine fauna, feeding ourselves on offal like shrimps. Only occasionally the soul rises gasping through the fathomless fathoms under which we live, far up to the surface of the ether, where there is true air. D.h. Lawrence

And dimly she realised one of the great laws of the human soul: that when the emotional soul receives a wounding shock, which does not kill the body, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is only appearance. It is really only the mechanism of the resumed habit. Slowly, slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like a bruise, which only slowly deepens its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche. And when we think we have recovered and forgotten, it is then that the terrible after-effects have to be encountered at their worst. D.h. Lawrence

Don't you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up? D.h. Lawrence

When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego, and when we escape like squirrels turning in thecages of our personalityand get into the forests again, we shall shiver with cold and frightbut things will happen to usso that we don't know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in, and passion will make our bodies taut with power, we shall stamp our feet with new powerand old things will fall down, we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up likeburnt paper. D.h. Lawrence

For God’s sake, let us be mennot monkeys minding machinesor sitting with our tails curledwhile the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone. Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces. D.h. Lawrence

Any man's a fool who lets himself be a wage-earning slave, today. D.h. Lawrence

The young man, perched insecurely in the slen­der branches, rocked till he felt slightly drunk, reached down the boughs, where the scarlet beady cherries hung thick underneath, and tore off handful after handful of the sleek, cool-fleshed fruit. Cherries touched his ears and his neck as he stretched forward, their chill fingertips sending a flash down his blood. All shades of red, from a golden vermilion to a rich crimson, glowed and met his eyes under a dark­ness of leaves. D.h. Lawrence

It was very still. The tree was tall and straggling. It had thrown its briers over a hawthorn-bush, and its long streamers trailed thick, right down to the grass, splashing the darkness everywhere with great spilt stars, pure white. In bosses of ivory and in large splashed stars the roses gleamed on the darkness of foliage and stems and grass. Paul and Miriam stood close together, silent, and watched. Point after point the steady roses shone out to them, seeming to kindle something in their souls. The dusk came like smoke around, and still did not put out the roses. . D.h. Lawrence

The days go by, through the brief silence of winter, when the sunshine is so still and pure, like iced wine, and the dead leaves gleam brown, and water sounds hoarse in the ravines. D.h. Lawrence

There was the loud noise of water, as ever, something eternal and maddening in its sound, like the sound of Time itself, rustling and rushing and wavering, but never for a second ceasing. The rushing of Time that continues throughout eternity, this is the sound of the icy streams of Switzerland, something that mocks and destroys out warm being. D.h. Lawrence

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. D.h. Lawrence

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. . D.h. Lawrence

The point is, what sort of a time can a man give a woman? Can he give her a damn good time, or can't he? If he can't he's no right to the woman... D.h. Lawrence

When one is grown up, money is lying about at one's service. It is only when one is young that it is rare. Take no thought for money - that always lies to hand.( Women in Love) D.h. Lawrence

We fucked a flame into being. D.h. Lawrence

Every man who is acutely alive is acutely wrestling his own soul. D.h. Lawrence

Yes, I do believe in something. I believe in being warm-hearted. Ibelieve especially in being warm-hearted in love, in fucking with awarm heart. I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the womentake it warm-heartedly, everything would come all right. It's all thiscold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy. D.h. Lawrence

Be as promiscuous as the rabbits! ' said Hammond. 'Why not? What's wrong with rabbits? Are they any worse than a neurotic, revolutionary humanity, full of nervous hate? D.h. Lawrence

Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to about the same thing. D.h. Lawrence

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

To be alive, to be man alive, to be whole man alive: that is the point. And at its best, the novel, and the novel supremely, can help you. It can help you not to be dead man in life. D.h. Lawrence

Connie’s man could be a bit sulky, and Hilda’s a bit jeering. 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. D.h. Lawrence

Man is willing to accept woman as an equal, as a man in skirts, as an angel, a devil, a baby-face, a machine, an instrument, a bosom, a womb, a pair of legs, a servant, an encyclopaedia, an ideal or an obscenity; the one thing he won’t accept her as, is a human being, a real human being of the feminine sex. D.h. Lawrence

The final fact being that at the very bottom of his soul he was an outsider, and anti-social, and he accepted the fact inwardly, no matter how Bond-Streety he was on the outside. His isolation was a necessity to him; just as the appearance of conformity and mixing-in with the smart people was also a necessity. D.h. Lawrence

In every living thing there is the desire for love. D.h. Lawrence

You can't insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it. D.h. Lawrence

When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language. D.h. Lawrence

The days passed, the weeks. But everything seemed to have fused, gone into a conglomerated mass. He could not tell one day from another, hardly one place from another. Nothing was distinct or distinguishable. Often he lost himself for an hour at a time, could not remember what he had done. D.h. Lawrence

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

All the great words, it seemed to Connie were cancelled, for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead now and dying from day to day. D.h. Lawrence

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. D.h. Lawrence

I only want one thing of men, and that is, that they should leave me alone. D.h. Lawrence

That’s the place to get to–nowhere. One wants to wander away from the world’s somewheres, into our own nowhere. D.h. Lawrence

Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe. The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass. D.h. Lawrence

The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few in most personal experience. 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. D.h. Lawrence

The mighty question arises upon us, what is one's own real self? It certainly is not what we think we are and ought to be. D.h. Lawrence

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! D.h. Lawrence

So he was always in the town at one place or another, drinking, knocking about with the men he knew. It really wearied him. He talked to barmaids, to almost any woman, but there was that dark, strained look in his eyes, as if he were hunting something. Everything seemed so different, so unreal. There seemed no reason why people should go along the street, and houses pile up in the daylight. There seemed no reason why these things should occupy the space, instead of leaving it empty. His friends talked to him: he heard the sounds, and he answered. But why there should be the noise of speech he could not understand. D.h. Lawrence

I 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 helpand patience, and a certain difficult repentancelong difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneselffrom the endless repetition of the mistakewhich mankind at large has chosen to sanctify. D.h. Lawrence

It was like something lurking in the darkness within him... There is remained in the darkness, the great pain, tearing him at times, and then being silent. D.h. Lawrence

A young man is afraid of his demon and pulls his hand over the demon's mouth sometimes and speaks for him. D.h. Lawrence

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! D.h. Lawrence

One's action ought to come out of an achieved stillness: not to be a mere rushing on. D.h. Lawrence

Connie felt again the tightness, niggardliness of the men of her generation. They were so tight, so scared of life! D.h. Lawrence

On revient toujours a son premier amour." It sounds like a cynicism to-day. As if we really meant: "On ne revient jamais a son premier amour." But as a matter of fact, a man never leaves his first love, once the love is established. He may leave his first attempt at love. Once a man establishes a full dynamic communication at the deeper and higher centers, with a woman, this can never be broken. But sex in the head breaks down, and half circuits break down. Once the full circuit is established, however, this can never break. D.h. Lawrence

She was only really a female to him. But perhaps that was better. And after all, he was kind to the female in her, which no man had ever been. Men were very kind to the person she was, but rather cruel to the female, despising her or ignoring her altogether. Men were awfully kind to Constance Reid or to Lady Chatterley; but not to her womb they weren’t kind. And he took no notice of Constance or of Lady Chatterley; he just softly stroked her loins or her breasts. D.h. Lawrence

Man is willing to accept woman as an equal, as a man in skirts, as an angel, a devil, a baby-face, a machine, an instrument, a bosom, a womb, a pair of legs, a servant, an encyclopaedia, an ideal or an obscenity; the one thing he won't accept her as is a human being, a real human being of the feminine sex. D.h. Lawrence

Humanity is a huge aggregate lie, and a huge lie is less than a small truth. Humanity is less, far less than the individual because the individual may sometimes be capable of truth, and humanity is a tree of lies. And they say that love is greatest thing, they persist in saying this, the foul liars, and just look at what they do (..It's a lie to say that love is greatest, what people want is hate - hate, and nothing but hate. And in the name of righteousness and love they get it.. If we want hate, let us have it - death, murder, torture, violent destruction- let us have it: but not in the name of love. D.h. Lawrence

All the lot. Their spunk is gone dead. Motor-cars and cinemas and aeroplanes suck that last bit out of them. I tell you, every generation breeds a more rabbity generation, with India rubber tubing for guts and tin legs and tin faces. Tin people! It’s all a steady sort of bolshevism just killing off the human thing, and worshipping the mechanical thing. Money, money, money! All the modern lot get their real kick out of killing the old human feeling out of man, making mincemeat of the old Adam and the old Eve. They’re all alike. The world is all alike: kill off the human reality, a quid for every foreskin, two quid for each pair of balls. What is cunt but machine-fucking! – It’s all alike. Pay ’em money to cut off the world’s cock. Pay money, money, money to them that will take spunk out of mankind, and leave ’em all little twiddling machines. D.h. Lawrence

He toasted his bacon on a fork and caught the drops of fat on his bread; then he put the rasher on his thick slice of bread, and cut off chunks with a clasp-knife, poured his tea into his saucer, and was happy. D.h. Lawrence

I am turned into a dream. I feel nothing, or I don't know what I feel. Yet it seems to me I am happy. D.h. Lawrence

Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor teaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup. . D.h. Lawrence

The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul, angry or gentle. Anger is just, and pity is just, but judgement is never just. D.h. Lawrence

I WANT her though, to take the same from me. She touches me as if I were herself, her own. She has not realized yet, that fearful thing, that I am the other, she thinks we are all of one piece. It is painfully untrue. I want her to touch me at last, ah, on the root andquick of my darknessand perish on me, as I have perished on her. Then, we shall be two and distinct, we shall haveeach our separate being. And that will be pure existence, real liberty. Till then, we are confused, a mixture, unresolved, unextricated one from the other. It is in pure, unutterable resolvedness, distinctionof being, that one is free, not in mixing, merging, not in similarity. When she has put her hand on my secret, darkestsources, the darkest outgoings, when it has struck home to her, like a death, "this is _him! _"she has no part in it, no part whatever, it is the terrible _other_, when she knows the fearful _other flesh_, ah, dark-ness unfathomable and fearful, contiguous and concrete, when she is slain against me, and lies in a heaplike one outside the house, when she passes away as I have passed awaybeing pressed up against the _other_, then I shall be glad, I shall not be confused with her, I shall be cleared, distinct, single as if burnished in silver, having no adherence, no adhesion anywhere, one clear, burnished, isolated being, unique, and she also, pure, isolated, complete, two of us, unutterably distinguished, and in unutterable conjunction. Then we shall be free, freer than angels, ah, perfect. V I I I A F T E R that, there will only remain that all mendetach themselves and become unique, that we are all detached, moving in freedom morethan the angels, conditioned only by our own pure single being, having no laws but the laws of our own being. Every human being will then be like a flower, untrammelled. Every movement will be direct. Only to be will be such delight, we cover our faceswhen we think of itlest our faces betray us to some untimely fiend. Every man himself, and therefore, a surpassingsingleness of mankind. The blazing tiger will spring upon the deer, un-dimmed, the hen will nestle over her chickens, we shall love, we shall hate, but it will be like music, sheer utterance, issuing straight out of the unknown, the lightning and the rainbow appearing in usunbidden, unchecked, like ambassadors. We shall not look before and after. We shall _be_, _now_.We shall know in full. We, the mystic NOW.(From the poem the Manifesto) . D.h. Lawrence

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. D.h. Lawrence

So, after three days of incessant brandy-drinking, he had burned out the youth from his blood, he had achieved this kindled state of oneness with all the world, which is the end of youth's most passionate desire. D.h. Lawrence

Only youth has a taste of immortality. D.h. Lawrence

And they fear nothing, and they respect nothing, the young don't. D.h. Lawrence

The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it. D.h. Lawrence

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon. D.h. Lawrence

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. D.h. Lawrence

He felt if he could not be alone, and if he could not be left alone, he would die. D.h. Lawrence

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

Sleep is still most perfect, in spite of hygienists, when it is shared with a beloved. The warmth, the security and peace of soul, the utter comfort from the touch of the other, knits the sleep, so that it takes the body and soul completely in its healing. D.h. Lawrence

But a democracy is bound in the end to be obscene, for it is composed of myriad disunited fragments, each fragment assuming to itself a false wholeness, a false individuality. Modern democracy is made up of millions of frictional parts all asserting their own wholeness. D.h. Lawrence

Democracy in America was never the same as Liberty in Europe. In Europe Liberty was a great life-throb. But in America Democracy was always something anti-life. The greatest democrats, like Abraham Lincoln, had always a sacrificial, self-murdering note in their voices. American Democracy was a form of self-murder, always. Or of murdering somebody else.. The love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. D.h. Lawrence

Why, oh why must one grow up, why must one inherit this heavy, numbing responsibility of living an undiscovered life? Out of the nothingness and the undifferentiated mass, to make something of herself! But what? In the obscurity and pathlessness to take a direction! But whither? How take even one step? And yet, how stand still? This was torment indeed, to inherit the responsibility of one’s own life. D.h. Lawrence

When we really want to go for something better, we shall smash the old. Until then, any sort of proposal, or making proposals, is no more than a tiresome game for self-important people. D.h. Lawrence

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. D.h. Lawrence

Oh build your ship of death, oh build it in time and build it lovingly, and put it between the hands of your soul. D.h. Lawrence