David Herbert Lawrence

For us to go to Italy and to penetrate into Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery

Build then the ship of death, for you must take the longest journey, to oblivion.

The near end of the street was rather dark and had mostly vegetable shops. Abundance of vegetables - piles of white and green fennel, like celery, and great sheaves of young, purplish, sea-dust-coloured artichokes . . . long strings of dried figs, mountains of big oranges, scarlet large peppers, a large slice of pumpkin, a great mass of colours and vegetable freshness. . . .

...where the electron behaves and misbehaves as it will, where the forces tie themselves up into knots of atoms and come united...

One might talk about the sanity of the atom the sanity of space the sanity of the electron the sanity of water- For it is all alive and has something comparable to that which we call sanity in ourselves. The only oneness is the oneness of sanity.

I like relativity and quantum theories because I don't understand them and they make me feel as if space shifted about like a swan that can't settle, refusing to sit still and be measured; and as if the atom were an impulsive thing always changing its mind.

Away with all ideals. Let each individual act spontaneously from the forever incalculable prompting of the creative wellhead within him. There is no universal law.

Let a person only approach his or her own self with a deep respect, even reverence for all that the creative soul, the God-mystery within us, puts forth. Then we shall all be sound and free. . . . The creative spontaneous soul sends forth its promptings of desire and aspiration in us. These promptings are our true fate, which is our business to fulfill. A fate dictated from outside, from theory or from circumstance, is a false fate.

I never knew how soothing trees are-many trees and patches of open sunlight, and tree presences; it is almost like having another being.

Money is a sort of instinct. It's a sort of property of nature in a person to make money. It's nothing you do. It's no trick you play. It's a sort of permanent accident of your own nature; once you start, you make money, and you go on. . . But you've got to begin. . . You've got to get in. You can do nothing if you are kept outside. You've got to beat your way in. Once you've done that, you can't help it!

Sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and consciousness. And the intelligence which goes with sex and beauty, and arises out of sex and beauty, is intuition.\' \'And they rock, and they rock, through the sensual ageless ages on the depths of the seven seas, and through the salt they reel with drunken delight and in the tropics tremble they with love and roll with massive, strong desire, like gods.

The mind has no existence by itself; it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.

In America the cohesion was a matter of choice and will. But in Europe it was organic.

The peasants of Sicily, who have kept their own wheat and make their own natural brown bread, ah, it is amazing how fresh and sweet and clean their loaf seems, so perfumed, as home-made bread used all to be before the war.

Museums, museums, object-lessons rigged out to illustrate the unsound theories of archaeologists, crazy attempts to co-ordinate and get into a fixed order that which has no fixed order and will not be co-coordinated! It is sickening! Why must all experience be systematized? A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch! Let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of a flower down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark.

When all comes to all, the most precious element in life is wonder. Love is a great emotion, and power is power. But both love and power are based on wonder.

You can't insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it.

The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.

The great mass of humanity should never learn to read or write.

The day of the absolute is over, and we're in for the strange gods once more.

Only in a novel are all things given full play.

One never can know the whys and the wherefores of one's passional changes.

Nothing that comes from the deep, passional soul is bad, or can be bad.

Men and women should stay apart, till their hearts grow gentle towards one another again.

Sex is the one thing you cannot really swindle; and it is the centre of the worst swindling of all, emotional swindling.... Sex lashes out against counterfeit emotion, and is ruthless, devastating against false love.

But then peace, peace! I am so mistrustful of it: so much afraid that it means a sort of weakness and giving in.

Ah, then, upon my bedroom I do draw <br />The blind to hide the garden, where the moon<br />Enjoys the open blossoms as they straw<br />Their beauty for his taking, boon for boon.<br /><br />And I do lift my aching arms to you,<br />And I do lift my anguished, avid breast,<br />And I do weep for very pain of you,<br />And fling myself at the doors of sleep, for rest.

Only at his maximum does an individual surpass all his derivative elements, and become purely himself. And most people never get there. In his own pure individuality a man surpasses his father and mother, and is utterly unknown to them.

Truth does not lie beyond humanity, but is one of the products of the human mind and feeling.