Quotes from DH Lawrence

One must strut, like a swan among geese.

Don't talk any more, she pleaded softly, laying her hand on his forehead. He lay quite still, almost unable to move. His body was somewhere discarded. Why not - are you tired? Yes, and it wears you out. He laughed shortly, realising. Yet you always make me like it, he said.

I look at my hands, and wonder what they are doing there. That water there ripples right through me. I'm sure that I am that rippling. It runs right through me, and I through it. There are no barriers between us... A sort of disseminates consciousness, that's all there is of me. I feel as if my body were laying empty, as if I were in the other things - clouds and water-... the individual bodily me is discarded. But if so then I am not alive here. I'm sure it would destroy me.

Goodness, man, don't be so lachrymose.

No, there's something wrong with the mental life, radically. It's rooted in spite and envy, envy and spite. Ye shall know the tree by its fruit.

Still he was ambitious. He had taken to writing stories; curious, very personal stories about people he had known. Clever, rather spiteful, and yet, in some mysterious way, meaningless. The observation was extraordinary and peculiar. But there was no touch, no actual contact. It was as if the whole thing took place in a vacuum. And since the field of life is largely an artificially-lighted stage today, the stories were curiously true to modern life, to the modern psychology, that is.

She felt different from the rest of them, with their hard, easy, shallow intimacy, that seemed to cost them so little.

Sometimes a good husband came along with his family, peacefully. But usually the women and children were alone.

And looking ahead, the prospect of her life made her feel as if she were buried alive.

She never suffered alone any more: the children suffered with her.

She had scornful grey eyes, a skin like white honey, and a full mouth with a slightly lifted upper lip, that did not know whether it was raised in scorn of all men, or out of eagerness to be kissed.

Because, after all, like so many modern men, he was finished almost before he had begun. And that forced the woman to be active.