D. H. Lawrence Quotes

“Cause-and-effect will not explain even the individuality of a single dandelion.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Delphi Complete Works of D. H. Lawrence

“The mosquito knows full well, small as he is he’s a beast of prey. But after all he only takes his bellyful, he doesn’t put my blood in the bank.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Delphi Complete Works of D. H. Lawrence

“But I will have it. I will love — it is my birthright. I will love the man I marry — that is all I care about.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Delphi Complete Works of D. H. Lawrence

“Man has made such a mighty struggle to feel at home on the face of the earth, without even yet succeeding.”
― D. H. Lawrence, The Complete Works

“You pluck flower after flower — it is never the flower. The flower itself — its calyx is a horrible gulf, it is the bottomless pit.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Delphi Complete Works of D. H. Lawrence

“she would be free of mundane care, she was a pure will towards right. She had sold herself, but she had a new freedom. She had got rid of her body. She had sold a lower thing, her body, for a higher thing, her freedom from material things.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Delphi Complete Works of D. H. Lawrence

“What we mean is that people may go on, keep on, and rush on, without souls. They have their ego and their will, that is enough to keep them going.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Delphi Complete Works of D. H. Lawrence

“They dun what they can. But it’s a hard job, it is, ter keep ‘em all goin’.”
― D.H. Lawrence, The Complete Novels of D. H. Lawrence

“The eyelashes droop a little in the dark, ageless, vulnerable faces. The drum is a heart beating with insistent thuds. And the spirits of the men go out on the ether, vibrating in waves from the hot, dark, intentional blood, seeking the creative presence that hovers for ever in the ether, seeking the identification, following on down the mysterious rhythms of the creative pulse, on and on into the germinating quick of the maize that lies under the ground, there, with the throbbing, pulsing, clapping rhythm that comes from the dark, creative blood in man, to stimulate the tremulous, pulsating protoplasm in the seed-germ, till it throws forth its rhythms of creative energy into rising blades of leaf and stem.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Delphi Collected Works of D. H. Lawrence

“The natives use human excrement for tanning leather. When Bernal Diaz came with Cortés to the great market-place of Mexico City, in Montezuma's day, he saw the little pots of human excrement in rows for sale, and the leather-makers going round sniffing to see which was the best, before they paid for it. It staggered even a fifteenth-century Spaniard. Yet my leather man and his wife think it screamingly funny that I smell the huaraches before buying them. Everything has its own smell, and the natural smell of huaraches is what it is. You might as well quarrel with an onion for smelling like an onion.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Delphi Collected Works of D. H. Lawrence

“where the moon was wrestling heroically to win free of the pack of clouds which hung on her like wolves on a white deer.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Delphi Complete Works of D. H. Lawrence

“WITH SPRING CAME trouble.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Delphi Collected Works of D. H. Lawrence

“He understood now that the Romans had preferred death to exile. He could sympathise now with Ovid on the Danube, hungering for Rome and blind to the land around him, blind to the savages.”
― D.H. Lawrence, D. H. Lawrence: The Complete Novels

“They remind me of mistletoe, which is never ours, though we wear it,” said Emily to me.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Delphi Collected Works of D. H. Lawrence

“down”
― D.H. Lawrence, The Complete Novels

“My thoughts
Chink against my ribs
And roll about like silver hail-stones.
I should like to spill them out,
And pour them, all shining,
Over you.
But my heart is shut upon them
And holds them straitly.
Come, You! and open my heart;
That my thoughts torment me no longer,
But glitter in your hair.”
― D.H. Lawrence, The Complete Works

“Most fatal, most hateful of all things is bullying. But what is bullying? It is a desire to superimpose my own will upon another person. Sensual bullying of course is fairly easily detected. What is more dangerous is ideal bullying. Bullying people into what is ideally good for them. I embrace for example an ideal, and[59] I seek to enact this ideal in the person of another. This is ideal bullying.”
― D.H. Lawrence, The Complete Works

“She woke me in the morning with cries of dismay.”
― D.H. Lawrence, X

“So they stood in the utter, dark kiss, that triumphed over them both, subjected them, knitted them into one fecund nucleus of the fluid darkness. It was bliss, it was the nucleolating of the fecund darkness. Once the vessel had vibrated till it was shattered, the light of consciousness gone, then the darkness reigned, and the unutterable satisfaction.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Delphi Collected Works of D. H. Lawrence

“What good was this place, this college? What good was Anglo-Saxon, when one only learned it in order to answer examination questions, in order that one should have a higher commercial value later on? She was sick with this long service at the inner commercial shrine. Yet what else was there? Was life all this, and this only? Everywhere, everything was debased to the same service. Everything went to produce vulgar things, to encumber material life.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Delphi Collected Works of D. H. Lawrence

“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, and must be left to the ancient worshippers of power, worship of Moloch. We do not worship power, in our enlightened souls. Power is degenerated to money and Napoleonic stupidity.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Delphi Collected Works of D. H. Lawrence

“Whether it turned into wine or whether it didn't," he said, "it doesn't bother me. I take it for what it is." "And what is it?" she asked, quickly, hopefully. "It's the Bible," he said. That answer enraged her, and she despised him.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Delphi Collected Works of D. H. Lawrence

“When did one come to an end? In which direction was it finished? There was no end, no finish, only this roaring vast space. Did one never get old, never die? That was the clue.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Delphi Collected Works of D. H. Lawrence

“Aaron Sisson was the last man on the little black railway-line”
― D.H. Lawrence, The Works of D. H. Lawrence

“while the black coal rose jutting round them, and the props of wood stood like little pillars in the low, black, very dark temple.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Delphi Complete Works of D. H. Lawrence

“could feel the male in him, something cold and triumphant,”
― D.H. Lawrence, Delphi Complete Works of D. H. Lawrence

“was in the grip of his moral, mental being.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Delphi Complete Works of D. H. Lawrence

“that curiously clean, semi-transparent look of the genteel, isolated poor.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Delphi Complete Works of D. H. Lawrence

“He had no particular character, having always depended on his position in society to give him position among men.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Delphi Complete Works of D. H. Lawrence

“The rabbit presses back her ears, Turns back her liquid, anguished eyes And crouches low: then with wild spring Spurts from the terror of his oncoming To be choked back, the wire ring Her frantic effort throttling: Piteous brown ball of quivering fears!”
― D.H. Lawrence, Delphi Complete Works of D. H. Lawrence