D.H. Lawrence > Quotes

“A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.”
― 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, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“I never saw a wild thing
Sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence

“One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it, and the journey is always towards the other soul.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken.It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“A woman unsatisfied must have luxuries. But a woman who loves a man would sleep on a board”
― 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, Women in Love

“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, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“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 se 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, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“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, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“All people dream, but not equally.
Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their mind, wake in the
morning to find that it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous
people, For they dream their dreams with open eyes, And make them come
true.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“She was always waiting, it seemed to be her forte.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze."

(Letter to Cynthia Asquith, November 1913)”
― D.H. Lawrence, Letters

“no form of love is wrong, so long as it is love, and you yourself honour what you are doing. Love has an extraordinary variety of forms! And that is all there is in life, it seems to me. But I grant you, if you deny the variety of love you deny love altogether. If you try to specialize love into one set of accepted feelings, you wound the very soul of love. Love must be multi-form, else it is just tyranny, just death”
― 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

“But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love

“It's not art for art's sake, it's art for my sake. ”
― D.H. Lawrence

“Life is ours to be spent, not to
be saved.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“Love is never a fulfillment. Life is never a thing of continuous bliss. There is no paradise. Fight and laugh and feel bitter and feel bliss: and fight again. Fight, fight. That is life.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“I love trying things and discovering how I hate them.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“A little morphine in all the air. It would be wonderfully refreshing for everyone.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“Money poisons you when you've got it, and starves you when you haven't.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego,
and when we escape like squirrels turning in the
cages of our personality
and get into the forests again,
we shall shiver with cold and fright
but things will happen to us
so 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 power
and old things will fall down,
we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like
burnt paper.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“Obscenity only comes in when the mind despises and fears the body, and the body hates and resists the mind.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“i am part of the sun as my eye is of me. that i am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“The human soul needs beauty more than bread.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“Every true artist is the salvation of every other. Only artists produce for each other a world that is fit to live in.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love

“This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. ”
― D.H. Lawrence

“Life 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. Lawrence

“Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world down to fit yourself. ”
― D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love

“Be a good animal,true to your instincts.”
― D.H. Lawrence, The White Peacock

“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.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“We fucked a flame into being”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“When the emotional soul receives a wounding shock, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is only in appearance. 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

“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, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“Human love, human trust, are always perilous, because they break down. The greater the love, the greater the trust, and the greater the peril, the greater the disaster. Because to place absolute trust on another human being is in itself a disaster, both ways, since each human being is a ship that must sail its own course, even if it go in company with another ship.... And yet, love is the greatest thing between human beings.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“And all the time she felt the reflection of his hopelessness in her. She couldn't quite, quite love in hoplessness. And he, being hopeless, couldn't ever love at all.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love

“When I hear modern people complain of being lonely then I know what has happened. They have lost the cosmos.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Apocalypse

“His body was urgent against her, and she didn't have the heart anymore to fight...She saw his eyes, tense and brilliant, fierce, not loving. But her will had left her. A strange weight was on her limbs. She was giving way. She was giving up...she had to lie down there under the boughs of the tree, like an animal, while he waited, standing there in his shirt and breeches, watching her with haunted eyes...He too had bared the front part of his body and she felt his naked flesh against her as he came into her. For a moment he was still inside her, turgid there and quivering. Then as he began to move, in the sudden helpless orgasm, there awoke in her new strange thrills rippling inside her. Rippling, rippling, rippling, like a flapping overlapping of soft flames, soft as feathers, running to points of brilliance, exquisite and melting her all molten inside. It was like bells rippling up and up to a culmination. She lay unconscious of the wild little cries she uttered at the last. But it was over too soon, too soon, and she could no longer force her own conclusion with her own activity. This was different, different. She could do nothing. She could no longer harden and grip for her own satisfaction upon him. She could only wait, wait and moan in spirit and she felt him withdrawing, withdrawing and contracting, coming to the terrible moment when he would slip out of her and be gone. Whilst all her womb was open and soft, and softly clamouring, like a sea anenome under the tide, clamouring for him to come in again and make fulfillment for her. She clung to him unconscious in passion, and he never quite slipped from her, and she felt the soft bud of him within her stirring, and strange rhythms flushing up into her with a strange rhythmic growing motion, swelling and swelling til it filled all her cleaving consciousness, and then began again the unspeakable motion that was not really motion, but pure deepening whirlpools of sensation swirling deeper and deeper through all her tissue and consciousness, til she was one perfect concentric fluid of feeling, and she lay there crying in unconscious inarticulate cries.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“You live by what you thrill to, and there's the end of it.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“Sleep seems to hammer out for me the logical conclusions of my vague days, and offer them to me as dreams. ”
― 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

“And that is how we are. By strength of will we cut off our inner intuitive knowledge from admitted consciousness. This causes a state of dread, or apprehension, which makes the blow ten times worse when it does fall.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made personal, merely personal feeling. This is what is the matter with us: we are bleeding at the roots because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars. Love has become a grinning mockery because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the Tree of Life and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table.”
― D.H. Lawrence