For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.
Nobody knows you.You don’t know yourself.And I, who am half in love with you,What am I in love with?My own imaginings?
A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it.
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.
I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.”, November 1913)
The living self has one purpose only: to come into its own fullness of being.
Human desire is the criterion of all truth and all good. 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…
Oh, I’ve no patience with these romances. They’re the ruin of all order. It’s a thousand pities they ever happened
When along the pavement,Palpitating flames of life,People flicker around me,I forget my bereavement,The gap in the great constellation,The place where a star used to be
There is nothing to save, now all is lost,but a tiny core of stillness in the heartlike the eye of a violet.
The profoundest of all sensualitiesis the sense of truthand the next deepest sensual experienceis the sense of justice.
My God, these folks don’t know how to love — that’s why they love so easily.
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.
One sheds ones sickness in books- repeats and presents again ones emotions, to be master of them.
Aren’t I enough for you?’ she asked.’No,’ he said. ‘You are enough for me, as far as a woman is concerned. You are all women to me. But I wanted a man friend, as eternal as you and I are eternal.'(Women in Love)
Recklessness is almost a man’s revenge on his woman.
Men don’t think, high and low-alike, they take what a woman does for them for granted.
The day of the absolute is over, and we’re in for the strange gods once more
Don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?
For God’s sake, let us be mennot monkeys minding machinesor sitting with our tails curledwhile the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone.Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces.
Any man’s a fool who lets himself be a wage-earning slave, today.
The days go by, through the brief silence of winter, when the sunshine is so still and pure, like iced wine, and the dead leaves gleam brown, and water sounds hoarse in the ravines.
The point is, what sort of a time can a man give a woman? Can he give her a damn good time, or can’t he? If he can’t he’s no right to the woman…
When one is grown up, money is lying about at one’s service. It is only when one is young that it is rare. Take no thought for money – that always lies to hand.(Women in Love)
Every man who is acutely alive is acutely wrestling his own soul.
Be as promiscuous as the rabbits!’ said Hammond. ‘Why not? What’s wrong with rabbits? Are they any worse than a neurotic, revolutionary humanity, full of nervous hate?
Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to about the same thing.
But you don’t fuck me cold-heartedly,’ she protested.’I don’t want to fuck you at all.’Lady Chatterly’s Lover
To be alive, to be man alive, to be whole man alive: that is the point. And at its best, the novel, and the novel supremely, can help you. It can help you not to be dead man in life.
In every living thing there is the desire for love.
You can’t insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it.
When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.
And she shrank away again, back into her darkness, and for a long while remained blotted safely away from living.
All the great words, it seemed to Connie were cancelled, for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead now and dying from day to day.
I only want one thing of men, and that is, that they should leave me alone.
That’s the place to get to—nowhere. One wants to wander away from the world’s somewheres, into our own nowhere.
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.
The mighty question arises upon us, what is one’s own real self? It certainly is not what we think we are and ought to be.
You are the call and I am the answer,You are the wish, and I the fulfilment,You are the night, and I the day. What else? It is perfect enough. It is perfectly complete. You and I, What more—? Strange, how we suffer in spite of this!
It was like something lurking in the darkness within him…There is remained in the darkness, the great pain, tearing him at times, and then being silent.
A young man is afraid of his demon and pulls his hand over the demon’s mouth sometimes and speaks for him.
One’s action ought to come out of an achieved stillness: not to be a mere rushing on.
Connie felt again the tightness, niggardliness of the men of her generation. They were so tight, so scared of life!
He toasted his bacon on a fork and caught the drops of fat on his bread; then he put the rasher on his thick slice of bread, and cut off chunks with a clasp-knife, poured his tea into his saucer, and was happy.
I am turned into a dream. I feel nothing, or I don’t know what I feel. Yet it seems to me I am happy.
The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul, angry or gentle. Anger is just, and pity is just, but judgement is never just.
For {she} had adopted the standard of the young: what there was in the moment was everything. And moments followed one another without necessarily belonging to one another.
So, after three days of incessant brandy-drinking, he had burned out the youth from his blood, he had achieved this kindled state of oneness with all the world, which is the end of youth’s most passionate desire.
And they fear nothing, and they respect nothing, the young don’t.
The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.
He felt if he could not be alone, and if he could not be left alone, he would die.
She was always waiting, it seemed to be her forte.
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.
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.
Oh build your ship of death, oh build it in time and build it lovingly, and put it between the hands of your soul.
Sleep seems to hammer out for me the logical conclusions of my vague days, and offer them to me as dreams.
Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste than Herman Melville.
Sometimes a high moon, liquid-brilliant, scudded across a hollow space and took cover under electric, brown-iridescent cloud-edges.
Gods should be iridescent, like the rainbow in the storm. Man creates a God in his own image, and the gods grow old along with the men that made them… But the god-stuff roars eternally, like the sea, with too vast a sound to be heard.
She lost her illusions in the collapse of her sympathies.
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.
They stood together in a false intimacy, a nervous contact. And he was in love with her.
She, who was bored almost to agony, and who had nothing at all to do, she had not time to think even, seriously, of anything. Time being, after all, only the current of the soul in its flow.
It was the talk that mattered supremely: the impassioned exchange of talk. Love was only a minor accompaniment.
The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble.
Time went on grey, uncloured, like a long journey where she sat unconscious as the landscape unrolled beside her.