56 quotes
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.
A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1929)
I fall asleep with the gods, the gods
that are not, or that are
according to the soul’s desire,
like a pool into which we plunge, or do not plunge.
More Pansies (1932)
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.
The gods are nameless and imageless
yet looking in a great full lime-tree of summer
I suddenly saw deep into the eyes of gods:
it is enough.
More Pansies (1932)
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.
Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)
There was only this one lamp-post. Behind was the great scoop of darkness, as if all the night were there.
The nature of the infant is not just a new permutation-and-combination of elements contained in the natures of the parents. There is in the nature of the infant that which is utterly unknown in the natures of the parents.
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921)
Of course Celia shits! Who doesn't? And how much worse if she didn't.
A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1929)
I want to go south, where there is no autumn, where the cold doesn't crouch over one like a snow leopard waiting to pounce. The heart of the North is dead, and the fingers of cold are corpse fingers.
Men are not bad, when they are free.
Prison makes men bad, and the money compulsion
makes men bad.
If men were free from the terror of earning a living
there would be abundance in the world
and men would work gaily.
The world is wonderful and beautiful and good beyond one's wildest imagination. Never, never, never could one conceive what love is, beforehand, never. Life can be great-quite god-like. It can be so. God be thanked I have proved it.
"I don't think I love you as a man ought to love his wife"
Sons and Lovers (1913)
It was in 1915 the old world ended.
Kangaroo (1923)
Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can't invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.
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.
Sons and Lovers (1913)
Every continent has its own great spirit of place. Every people is polarized in some particular locality, which is home, the homeland. Different places on the face of the earth have different vital effluence, different vibration, different chemical exhalation, different polarity with different stars: call it what you like. But the spirit of place is a great reality.