D. H. Lawrence - Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

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For, of course, being a girl, one's whole dignity and meaning in life consisted in the achievement of an absolute, a perfect, a pure and noble freedom. What else did a girl's life mean?

D. H. Lawrence
The Italians are not passionate: passion has deep reserves. They are easily moved, and often affectionate, but they rarely have any abiding passion of any sort.

D. H. Lawrence
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
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
You're spending your life without renewing it. You've got to be amused, properly healthily amused. You're spending your vitality without making any. Can't go on you know. Depression! Avoid depression!

D. H. Lawrence
Now go away then, and leave me alone. I don't want any more of your meretricious persiflage.

D. H. Lawrence
She herself had never been able to be altogether herself: it had been denied her.

D. H. Lawrence
Sex is really only touch, the closest of all touch. And it's touch we're afraid of.

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

D. H. Lawrence
John Thomas says good-night to Lady Jane, a little droopingly, but with a hopeful heart.

D. H. Lawrence
That's how women are with me " said Paul. "They want me like mad but they don't want to belong to me.

D. H. Lawrence
He always ran away from the battle with himself. Even in his own heart's privacy, he excused himself, saying, "If she hadn't said so-and-so, it would never have happened.

D. H. Lawrence
Necessary, forever necessary, to burn out false shames and smelt the heaviest ore of the body into purity.

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
But, especially in love, only counterfeit emotions exist nowadays. We have all been taught to mistrust everybody emotionally, from parents downwards, or upwards. Don't trust anybody with your real emotions: if you've got any: that is the slogan of today. Trust them with your money, even, but never with your feelings. They are bound to trample on them.

D. H. Lawrence
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
Never was an age more sentimental, more devoid of real feeling, more exaggerated in false feeling, than our own.

D. H. Lawrence
I believe in being warm-hearted. I believe especially in being warm-hearted in love, in fucking with a warm heart. I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the women take it warm-heartedly, everything would come all right. It's all the cold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy.

D. H. Lawrence
And dimly she realized 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 reassumed 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
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
Vitally, the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree, with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in the universe.

D. H. Lawrence
She wished some help would come from outside. But in the whole world there was no help. Society was terrible because it was insane. Civilized society is insane. Money and so-called love are its two great manias; money a long way first. The individual asserts himself in his disconnected insanity in these two modes: money and love.

D. H. Lawrence
Of course Celia shits! Who doesn't? And how much worse if she didn't.

D. H. Lawrence
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
Recklessness is almost a man's revenge on his woman. He feels he is not valued so he will risk destroying himself to deprive her altogether.

D. H. Lawrence
The world is a raving idiot, and no man can kill it: though I'll do my best. But you're right. We must rescue ourselves as best we can.

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
Men and women aren't really dogs: they only look like it and behave like it. Somewhere inside there is a great chagrin and a gnawing discontent.

D. H. Lawrence
Sex is just another form of talk, where you act the words instead of saying them.

D. H. Lawrence
Folks should do their own fuckin', then they wouldn't want to listen to a lot of clatfart about another man's.

D. H. Lawrence