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Melville Had To Fight, Fight Against The Existing World, Against His Own Very Self. Only He Would Never Quite Put The Knife In The Heart Of His Paradisal Ideal. Somehow, Somewhere, Somewhen, Love Should Be A Fulfillment, And Life Should Be A Thing Of Bliss. That Was His Fixed Ideal. Fata Morgana. That Was The Pin He Tortured Himself On, Like A Pinned-down Butterfly.

-D. H. Lawrence

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Melville Had To Fight,

D. H. Lawrence

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Melville Had To Fight, Fight Against The Existing World, Against His Own Very Self. Only He Would Never Quite Put The Knife In The Heart Of His Paradisal Ideal. Somehow, Somewhere, Somewhen, Love Should Be A Fulfillment, And Life Should Be A Thing Of Bliss. That Was His Fixed Ideal. Fata Morgana. That Was The Pin He Tortured Himself On, Like A Pinned-down Butterfly.

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Towns Oftener Swamp One Than Carry One Out Onto The Big Ocean Of Life.

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Love Is The Flower Of Life, And Blossoms Unexpectedly And Without Law, And Must Be Plucked Where It Is Found, And Enjoyed For The Brief Hour Of Its Duration.

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I Don't Like Your Miserable Lonely Single Front Name. It Is So Limited, So Meager; It Has No Versatility; It Is Weighted Down With The Sense Of Responsibility; It Is Worn Threadbare With Much Use; It Is As Bad As Having Only One Jacket And One Hat; It Is Like Having Only One Relation, One Blood Relation, In The World. Never Set A Child Afloat On The Flat Sea Of Life With Only One Sail To Catch The Wind.

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Build Then The Ship Of Death, For You Must Take The Longest Journey, To Oblivion.

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Happiness Was A Term Of Hypocrisy Used To Bluff Other People.

It Is Our Business To Go As We Are Impelled.

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It's Terrible, Once You've Got A Man Into Your Blood!" She Said.

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The Flood Subsides, And The Body, Like A Worn Sea-shell Emerges Strange And Lovely.

It Seems To Me Absolutely True, That Our World, Which Appears To Us The Surface Of All Things, Is Really The Bottom Of A Deep Ocean: All Our Trees Are Submarine Growths, And We Are Weird, Scaly-clad Submarine Fauna, Feeding Ourselves On Offal Like Shrimps. Only Occasionally The Soul Rises Gasping Through The Fathomless Fathoms Under Which We Live, Far Up To The Surface Of The Ether, Where There Is True Air.

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So As Long As You Can Forget Your Body You Are Happy And The Moment You Begin To Be Aware Of Your Body, You Are Wretched. So If Civilization Is Any Good, It Has To Help Us Forget Our Bodies, And Then Time Passes Happily Without Our Knowing It. Help Us Get Rid Of Our Bodies Altogether.

Sleep Is Still Most Perfect, In Spite Of Hygienists, When It Is Shared With A Beloved. The Warmth, The Security And Peace Of Soul, The Utter Comfort From The Touch Of The Other, Knits The Sleep, So That It Takes The Body And Soul Completely In Its Healing.

One Doesn't Know, Till One Is A Bit At Odds With The World, How Much One's Friends Who Believe In One Rather Generously, Mean To One.

Brute Force Crushes Many Plants. Yet The Plants Rise Again. The Pyramids Will Not Last A Moment Compared With The Daisy. And Before Buddha Or Jesus Spoke The Nightingale Sang, And Long After The Words Of Jesus And Buddha Are Gone Into Oblivion The Nightingale Still Will Sing. Because It Is Neither Preaching Nor Commanding Nor Urging. It Is Just Singing. And In The Beginning It Was Not A Word, But A Chirrup.

When One Jumps Over The Edge, One Is Bound To Land Somewhere.

Now Go Away Then, And Leave Me Alone. I Don't Want Any More Of Your Meretricious Persiflage.

There's Always The Hyena Of Morality At The Garden Gate, And The Real Wolf At The End Of The Street.

One Must Learn To Love, And Go Through A Good Deal Of Suffering To Get To It, Like Any Knight Of The Grail, And The Journey Is Always Towards The Other Soul, Not Away From It. . . . To Love You Have To Learn To Understand The Other, More Than She Understands Herself, And To Submit To Her Understanding Of You. It Is Damnably Difficult And Painful, But It Is The Only Thing Which Endures.

Ours Is Essentially A Tragic Age, So We Refuse To Take It Tragically. The Cataclysm Has Happened, We Are Among The Ruins, We Start To Build Up New Little Habitats, To Have New Little Hopes. It Is Rather Hard Work: There Is Now No Smooth Road Into The Future: But We Go Round, Or Scramble Over The Obstacles. We’ve Got To Live, No Matter How Many Skies Have Fallen.

Whatever A Human Being Makes And Makes Live, It Lives Because Of The Life He Puts Into It.

You Must Drop All Your Democracy. You Must Not Believe In ''the People.'' One Class Is No Better Than Another. It Must Be A Case Of Wisdom, Or Truth. Let The Working Classes Be Working Classes. That Is The Truth. There Must Be An Aristocracy Of People Who Have Wisdom, And There Must Be A Ruler: A Kaiser: No Presidents And Democracies.

I Think New Mexico Was The Greatest Experience From The Outside World That I Have Ever Had.

The Only Principle I Can See In This Life, Is That One Must Forfeit The Less For The Greater.

Water Is H2o, Hydrogen Two Parts, Oxygen One, But There Is Also A Third Thing, That Makes It Water And Nobody Knows What That Is.

I See A Redness Suddenly Come Into The Evening's Anxious Breast-- 'tis The Wound Of Love Goes Home!

At A Wavering Instant The Swallows Gave Way To Bats By The Ponte Vecchio . . . Changing Guard.

The Journey Of Love Has Been Rather A Lacerating, If Well-worth-it, Journey.

The Mystery Of The Evening-star Brilliant In Silence And Distance Between The Downward-surging Plunge Of The Sun And The Vast, Hollow Seething Of Inpouring Night. The Magnificence Of The Watchful Morning-star, That Watches Between The Night And The Day, The Gleaming Clue To The Two Opposites.

Any Novel Of Importance Has A Purpose. If Only The "purpose" Be Large Enough, And Not At Outs With The Passional Inspiration.

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.

Life Is A Travelling To The Edge Of Knowledge, Then A Leap Taken.

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What We Want Is To Destroy Our False, Inorganic Connections, Especially Those Related To Money, And Re-establish The Living Organic Connections, With The Cosmos, The Sun And Earth, With Mankind And Nation And Family. Start With The Sun, And The Rest Will Slowly, Slowly Happen.

I Want To Live My Life So That My Nights Are Not Full Of Regrets.

Only In A Novel Are All Things Given Full Play.

He Had Made A Passionate Study Of Education, Only To Come, Gradually, To The Knowledge That Education Is Nothing But The Process Of Building Up, Gradually, A Complete Unit Of Consciousness. And Each Unit Of Consciousness Is The Living Unit Of That Great Social, Religious, Philosophic Idea Towards Which Humankind, Like An Organism Seeking Its Final Form, Is Laboriously Growing.

The Final Aim Is Not To Know, But To Be.... You've Got To Know Yourself So That You Can At Last Be Yourself. "be Yourself" Is The Last Motto.

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Psychoanalysis Is Out, Under A Therapeutic Disguise, To Do Away Entirely With The Moral Faculty In Man.

You Must Always Be A-waggle With Love.

And Besides, Look At Elder Flowers And Bluebells-they Are A Sign That Pure Creation Takes Place - Even The Butterfly. But Humanity Never Gets Beyond The Caterpillar Stage -it Rots In The Chrysalis, It Never Will Have Wings.it Is Anti-creation, Like Monkeys And Baboons.

So Long As You Don't Feel Life's Paltry And A Miserable Business, The Rest Doesn't Matter, Happiness Or Unhappiness.

She Had Borne So Long The Cruelty Of Belonging To Him And Not Being Claimed By Him.

The Human Being Is A Most Curious Creature. He Thinks He Has Got One Soul, And He Has Got Dozens.

There Are Three Cures For Ennui: Sleep, Drink And Travel.

Sentimentalism Is The Working Off On Yourself Of Feelings You Haven't Really Got.

In The End, For Congenial Sympathy, For Poetry, For Work, For Original Feeling And Expression, For Perfect Companionship With One's Friends--give Me The Country.

How I Hate The Attitude Of Ordinary People To Life. How I Loathe Ordinariness! How From My Soul I Abhor Nice Simple People, With Their Eternal Price List. It Makes My Blood Boil.

People Always Make War When They Say They Love Peace.

Satire Exists For The Purpose Of Killing The Social Being [for The Sake Of] The True Individual, The Real Human Being.

Gods Die With Men Who Have Conceived Them. But The God-stuff Roars Eternally, Like The Sea, With Too Vast A Sound To Be Heard.

I Cannot Get Any Sense Of An Enemy - Only Of A Disaster.

At The Back Of My Life's Horizon, Where The Dreamings Of Past Lives Crowd.

Religion Was Fading Into The Background. He Had Shovelled Away All The Beliefs That Would Hamper Him, Had Cleared The Ground, And Come More Or Less To The Bedrock Of Belief That One Should Feel Inside Oneself For Right Or Wrong, And Should Have The Patience To Gradually Realise One's God. Now Life Interested Him More.

A Young Man Is Afraid Of His Demon And Puts His Hand Over The Demon's Mouth Sometimes And Speaks For Him. And The Things The Young Man Says Are Very Rarely Poetry.

[man's] Life Consists In A Relation With All Things: Stone, Earth, Trees, Flowers, Water, Insects, Fishes, Birds, Creatures, Sun,rainbow, Children, Women, Other Men. But His Greatest And Final Relation Is With The Sun.

The Lion Shall Never Lie Down With The Lamb. The Lion Eternally Shall Devour The Lamb, The Lamb Eternally Shall Be Devoured. Man Knows The Great Consummation In The Flesh, The Sensual Ecstasy, And That Is Eternal. Also The Spiritual Ecstasy Of Unanimity, That Is Eternal. But The Two Are Separate And Never To Be Confused.

Nothing Is As Bad As A Marriage That's A Hopeless Failure.

Oh, What A Catastrophe, What A Maiming Of Love When It Was Made Personal, Merely Personal Feeling. This Is What Is The Matter With Us: We Are Bleeding At The Roots Because We Are Cut Off From The Earth And Sun And Stars. Love Has Become A Grinning Mockery Because, Poor Blossom, We Plucked It From Its Stem On The Tree Of Life And Expected It To Keep On Blooming In Our Civilized Vase On The Table.

Rippling, Rippling, Rippling, Like A Flapping Overlapping Of Soft Flames, Soft As Feathers, Running To Points Of Brilliance, Exquisite, Exquisite And Melting Her All Molten Inside.

If It Doesn't Absorb You, If It Isn't Any Fun, Don't Do It.

Every New Stroke Of Civilization Has Cost The Lives Of Countless Brave Men, Who Have Fallen Defeated By The Dragon, In Their Efforts To Win The Apples Of The Hesperides, Or The Fleece Of Gold. Fallen In Their Efforts To Overcome The Old, Half Sordid Savagery Of The Lower Stages Of Creation, And Win The Next Stage.

What Is Pornography To One Man Is The Laughter Of Genius To Another.

The Mind Is "ashamed" Of The Blood. And The Blood Is Destroyed By The Mind, Actually. Hence Palefaces.

Nothing But Love Has Made The Dog Lose His Wild Freedom, To Become The Servant Of Man.

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