Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by D.H. Lawrence

Quote by D.H. Lawrence

Work

Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

D.H. Lawrence

Browse famous quotes and profile details for D.H. Lawrence. more

You May Also Like

“I'll give you the knife, and we'll look for your name together." "We're still enemies," he said. "Of course we are. And I'll keep trying to defeat you, and you'll keep trying to stop me. But in the meantime, we'll look for your name." I waited. I knew what he would say next: Let me do something about those virgin hands, and we'll have a deal. It was only logical, for obviously I could get the knife whenever I liked, and as long as I remained a virgin, I could still use it to fulfill the Rhyme. No matter how much I desired his kisses, the thought of letting him possess me entirely was still terrifying. But I'd come here prepared to offer up that much. I couldn't back out now. "Deal," he said. I blinked. He reached up and tapped my wrist. "All right!" I jerked thee knife away. He caught my wrist, took the knife, and threw it across the room. "You're worried about the knife but not my hands?" I demanded. "Well, I'm the mighty demon lord and I have your knife. It seems only fair to leave you some advantages." "But--" I realized with a wave of embarrassment that despite my relief, I was also disappointed. My face heated. He grinned as if he knew and kissed my palm.”

“I accused Hartley of being a 'fantasist', or perhaps that was Titus's word, but what a 'fantasist' I have been myself. I was the dreamer, I the magician. How much, I see as I look back, I read into it all, reading my own dream text and not looking at the reality. Hartley had been right when she said of our love that it was not part of the real world. It had no place.”

“I contemplated her, seeing her young bland face looking at me, now removed as if behind a gauze curtain. She quietly invited me to suffer. There was a great space now, a great silent hall in which this suffering could take place. There was no urgency now, nothing to plan, nothing to achieve. What shall I do with it, I asked her, what shall I do now with my love for you which you so terribly revived by reappearing in my life? Why did you come back, if you could not content me? What can I do now with the great useless machine of my love which has no wholesome work to do? I can do nothing for you any more, my darling. I wondered if I would be fated to live with this love, making of it a shrine which could not now be desecrated. Perhaps when I was living alone and being everyone's uncle like a celibate priest I would keep this fruitless love as my secret chapel. Could I then learn to love uselessly and unpossessively and would this prove to be the monastic mysticism which I had hoped to attain when I came away to the sea?”

“That is no doubt how the story ought to end, with the seals and the stars, explanation, resignation, reconciliation, everything picked up into some radiant bland ambiguous higher significance, in calm of mind, all passion spent. However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after; so I thought I might continue the tale a little longer in the form once again of a diary, though I suppose that, if this is a book, it will have to end, arbitrarily enough no doubt, in quite a short while.”