D. H. Lawrence - Sons and Lovers (1913)

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Whatever God there is is slowly eliminating the guts and alimentary system from the human being, to evolve a higher, more spiritual being.

D. H. Lawrence
You don't learn algebra with your blessed soul. Can't you look at it with your clear simple wits?

D. H. Lawrence
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
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
What's that as flies without wings, your ladyship? Time! Time!

D. H. Lawrence
Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the sniveling, dribbling, dithering palsied pulse-less lot that make up England today. They've got white of egg in their veins, and their spunk is that watery its a marvel they can breed. They can nothing but frog-spawn — the gibberers! God, how I hate them! God curse them, funkers. God blast them, wish-wash. Exterminate them, slime.
I could curse for hours and hours — God help me.

D. H. Lawrence
Mrs Morel always said the after-life would hold nothing in store for her husband: he rose from the lower world into purgatory, when he came home from pit, and passed into heaven in the Palmerston Arms.

D. H. Lawrence
It was as if thousands and thousands of little roots and threads of consciousness in him and her had grown together into a tangled mass, till they could crowd no more, and the plant was dying. Now quietly, subtly, she was unravelling the tangle of his consciousness and hers, breaking the threads gently, one by one, with patience and impatience to get clear.

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

D. H. Lawrence
You 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. 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
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
And in this passion for understanding her soul lay close to his; she had him all to herself. But he must be made abstract first.

D. H. Lawrence
Religion 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
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
They wanted genuine intimacy, but they could not get even normally near to anyone, because they scorned to take the first steps, they scorned the triviality which forms common human intercourse.

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
Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.

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
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
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
He talked to her endlessly about his love of horizontals: how they, the great levels of sky and land in Lincolnshire, meant to him the eternality of the will, just as the bowed Norman arches of the church, repeating themselves, meant the dogged leaping forward of the persistent human soul, on and on, nobody knows where; in contradiction to the perpendicular lines and to the Gothic arch, which, he said, leapt up at heaven and touched the ecstasy and lost itself in the divine.

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
Rippling, rippling, rippling, like a flapping overlapping of soft flames, soft as feathers, running to points of brilliance, exquisite, exquisite and melting her all molten inside.

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
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