D. H. Lawrence - Women in Love (1920)

56 Sourced Quotes

View all D. H. Lawrence Quotes
The difference between people isn't in their class, but in themselves. Only from the middle classes one gets ideas, and from the common people--life itself, warmth. You feel their hates and loves.

D. H. Lawrence
If a woman's got nothing but her fair fame to feed on, why, it's thin tack, and a donkey would die of it!

D. H. Lawrence
Happiness was a term of hypocrisy used to bluff other people.

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
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
He had made a passionate study of education, only to come, gradually, to the knowledge that education is nothing but the process of building up, gradually, a complete unit of consciousness. And each unit of consciousness is the living unit of that great social, religious, philosophic idea towards which humankind, like an organism seeking its final form, is laboriously growing.

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
And woman is the same as horses: two wills act in opposition inside her. With one will she wants to subject herself utterly. With the other she wants to bolt, and pitch her rider to perdition.

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
And then she realized that his presence was the wall, his presence was destroying her. Unless she could break out, she must die most fearfully, walled up in horror. And he was the wall. She must break down the wall. She must break him down before her, the awful obstruction of him who obstructed her life to the last. It must be done, or she must perish most horribly.

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

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
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
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 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
What one does in one's art, that is the breath of one's being. What one does in one's life, that is a bagatelle for the outsiders to fuss about.

D. H. Lawrence
And besides, look at elder flowers and bluebells-they are a sign that pure creation takes place - even the butterfly. But humanity never gets beyond the caterpillar stage -it rots in the chrysalis, it never will have wings.It is anti-creation, like monkeys and baboons.

D. H. Lawrence
Do come back and draw the ferrets, they are the most lovely noble darlings in the world.

D. H. Lawrence
Mystic equality lies in abstraction, not in having or in doing, which are processes. In function and process, one man, one part, must of necessity be subordinate to another. It is a condition of being.

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
Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world down to fit yourself.

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