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The Real Trouble About Women Is That They Must Always Go On Trying To Adapt Themselves To Men's Theories Of Women, As They Alwayshave Done. When A Woman Is Thoroughly Herself, She Is Being What Her Type Of Man Wants Her To Be. When A Woman Is Hysterical It's Because She Doesn't Quite Know What To Be, Which Pattern To Follow, Which Man's Picture Of Woman To Live Up To.

-D. H. Lawrence

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The Real Trouble About

D. H. Lawrence

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The Real Trouble About Women Is That They Must Always Go On Trying To Adapt Themselves To Men's Theories Of Women, As They Alwayshave Done. When A Woman Is Thoroughly Herself, She Is Being What Her Type Of Man Wants Her To Be. When A Woman Is Hysterical It's Because She Doesn't Quite Know What To Be, Which Pattern To Follow, Which Man's Picture Of Woman To Live Up To.

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Pure Morality Is Only An Instinctive Adjustment Which The Soul Makes.

Beauty Is An Experience, Nothing Else. It Is Not A Fixed Pattern Or An Arrangement Of Features. It Is Something Felt, A Glow Or A Communicated Sense Of Fineness.

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.

I Never Knew How Soothing Trees Are-many Trees And Patches Of Open Sunlight, And Tree Presences; It Is Almost Like Having Another Being.

I Want Us To Be Together Without Bothering About Ourselves- To Be Really Together Because We Are Together, As If It Were A Phenomenon, Not A Thing We Have To Maintain By Our Own Effort.

The Whole Point About The True Unconscious Is That It Is All The Time Moving Forward, Beyond The Range Of Its Own Fixed Laws Or Habits. It Is No Good Trying To Superimpose An Ideal Nature Upon The Unconscious.

But I Like The Feel Of Men On Things, While They're Alive. There's A Feel Of Men About Trucks, Because They've Been Handled With Men's Hands, All Of Them.

Morality In The Novel Is The Trembling Instability Of The Balance. When The Novelist Puts His Thumb In The Scale, To Pull Down The Balance To His Own Predilection, That Is Immorality.

When I Hear Modern People Complain Of Being Lonely Then I Know What Has Happened. They Have Lost The Cosmos.

A Man Has No Religion Who Has Not Slowly And Painfully Gathered One Together, Adding To It, Shaping It; And One's Religion Is Never Complete And Final, It Seems, But Must Always Be Undergoing Modification.

He Knew That Conscience Was Chiefly Fear Of Society Or Fear Of Oneself.

If A Woman Hasn't Got A Tiny Streak Of Harlot In Her, She's A Dry Stick As A Rule.

Now The Only Decent Way To Get Something Done Is To Get It Done By Somebody Who Quite Likes Doing It.

There Is No Such Thing As Liberty. You Only Change One Sort Of Domination For Another. All We Can Do Is To Choose Our Master.

You Can Have Your Cake And Eat It. But My God, It Will Go Rotten Inside You.

It Seems To Me A Purely Lyric Poet Gives Himself, Right Down To His Sex, To His Mood, Utterly And Abandonedly, Whirls Himself Roundtill He Spontaneously Combusts Into Verse. He Has Nothing That Goes On, No Passion, Only A Few Intense Moods, Separate Like Odd Stars, And When Each Has Burned Away, He Must Die.

Oh, What A Catastrophe For Man When He Cut Himself Off From The Rhythm Of The Year, From His Unison With The Sun And The Earth. Oh, What A Catastrophe, What A Maiming Of Love When It Was A Personal, Merely Personal Feeling, Taken Away From The Rising And The Setting Of The Sun, And Cut Off From The Magic Connection Of The Solstice And The Equinox!

I Am Convinced That The Air We Normally Breathe Is A Kind Of Water, And Men And Women Are A Species Of Fish.

And Woman Is The Same As Horses: Two Wills Act In Opposition Inside Her. With One Will She Wants To Subject Herself Utterly. With The Other She Wants To Bolt, And Pitch Her Rider To Perdition.

The Novel Is The One Bright Book Of Life. Books Are Not Life. They Are Only Tremulations On The Ether. But The Novel As A Tremulation Can Make The Whole Man Alive Tremble.

As We All Know, Too Much Of Any Divine Thing Is Destruction

Ursula And Gudrun Brangwen Sat One Morning In The Window-bay Of Their Father's House In Beldover, Working And Talking.

Only The Desert Has A Fascination--to Ride Alone--in The Sun In The Forever Unpossessed Country--away From Man. That Is A Great Temptation.

Now It Is Autumn And The Falling Fruit And The Long Journey Towards Oblivion. The Apples Falling Like Great Drops Of Dew To Bruise Themselves An Exit From Themselves.

We Must Get Back Into Relation, Vivid And Nourishing Relation To The Cosmos And The Universe. The Way Is Through Daily Ritual, Andis An Affair Of The Individual And The Household, A Ritual Of Dawn And Noon And Sunset, The Ritual Of The Kindling Fire And Pouring Water, The Ritual Of The First Breath, And The Last.

The Reaction To Any Word May Be, In An Individual, Either A Mob-reaction Or An Individual Reaction. It Is Up To The Individual To Ask Himself: Is My Reaction Individual, Or Am I Merely Reacting From My Mob-self? When It Comes To The So-called Obscene Words, I Should Say That Hardly One Person In A Million Escapes Mob-reaction.

The Dead Don't Die. They Look On And Help.

A Man Was Like A Child With His Appetites. A Woman Had To Yield Him What He Wanted, Or Like A Child He Would Probably Turn Nasty And Flounce Away And Spoil What Was A Very Pleasant Connection.

The More Scholastically Educated A Man Is Generally, The More He Is An Emotional Boor.

The Business Of Art Is To Reveal The Relation Between Man And His Environment.

Good God, What Does It Matter? If Life Is A Tragedy, Or A Farce, Or A Disaster, Or Anything Else, What Do I Care! Let Life Be What It Likes. Give Me A Drink, That's What I Want Just Now.

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

Oh Build Your Ship Of Death. Oh Build It! For You Will Need It. For The Voyage Of Oblivion Awaits You.

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.

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.

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

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

Human Love, Human Trust, Are Always Perilous, Because They Break Down. The Greater The Love, The Greater The Trust, And The Greater The Peril, The Greater The Disaster. Because To Place Absolute Trust On Another Human Being Is In Itself A Disaster, Both Ways, Since Each Human Being Is A Ship That Must Sail Its Own Course, Even If It Go In Company With Another Ship.... And Yet, Love Is The Greatest Thing Between Human Beings.

It Is Time That The Protestant Church, The Church Of The Son, Should Be One Again With The Roman Catholic Church, The Church Of The Father. It Is Time That Man Shall Cease, First To Live In The Flesh, With Joy, And Then, Unsatisfied, To Renounce And To Mortify The Flesh.

Sleep Seems To Hammer Out For Me The Logical Conclusions Of My Vague Days, And Offer Them To Me As Dreams.

For Man, The Vast Marvel Is To Be Alive. For Man, As For Flower And Beast And Bird, The Supreme Triumph Is To Be Most Vividly, Most Perfectly Alive. Whatever The Unborn May Know, They Cannot Know The Beauty, The Marvel Of Being Alive In The Flesh. The Dead May Look After The Afterwards. But The Magnificent Here And Now Of Life In The Flesh Is Ours, And Ours Alone, And Ours Only For A Time.

It Is A Fine Thing To Establish One's Own Religion In One's Heart, Not To Be Dependent On Tradition And Second-hand Ideals. Life Will Seem To You, Later, Not A Lesser, But A Greater Thing.

All Vital Truth Contains The Memory Of All That For Which It Is Not True.

The History Of The Cosmos Is The History Of The Struggle Of Becoming. When The Dim Flux Of Unformed Life Struggled, Convulsed Back And Forth Upon Itself, And Broke At Last Into Light And Dark Came Into Existence As Light, Came Into Existence As Cold Shadow Then Every Atom Of The Cosmos Trembled With Delight.

A Man Must Keep His Earnestness Nimble, To Escape Ridicule.

The Whole Question Of Pornography Seems To Me A Question Of Secrecy. Without Secrecy There Would Be No Pornography. But Secrecy And Modesty Are Two Utterly Different Things. Secrecy Has Always An Element Of Fear In It, Amounting Very Often To Hate. Modesty Is Gentle And Reserved. Today, Modesty Is Thrown To The Winds, Even In The Presence Of The Grey Guardians. But Secrecy Is Hugged, Being A Vice In Itself. And The Attitude Of The Grey Ones Is: Dear Young Ladies, You May Abandon All Modesty, So Long As You Hug Your Dirty Little Secret.

Are You Willing To Be Sponged Out, Erased, Cancelled, Made Nothing? Are You Willing To Be Made Nothing? Dipped Into Oblivion? If Not, You Will Never Really Change.

If You Don't Like It, Alter It, And If You Can't Alter It, Put Up With It.

The Artist Usually Sets Out -- Or Used To -- To Point A Moral And Adorn A Tale. The Tale, However, Points The Other Way, As A Rule. Two Blankly Opposing Morals, The Artist's And The Tale's. Never Trust The Artist. Trust The Tale. The Proper Functions Of A Critic Is To Save The Tale From The Artist Who Created It.

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

Lies About Love We Are All Liars, Because The Truth Of Yesterday Becomes A Lie Tomorrow, Whereas Letters Are Fixed, And We Live By The Letter Of Truth. The Love I Feel For My Friend, This Year, Is Different From The Love I Felt Last Year. If It Were Not So, It Would Be A Lie. Yet We Reiterate Love! Love! Love! As If It Were A Coin With Fixed Value Instead Of A Flower That Dies, And Opens A Different Bud.

That Is Your Trick, Your Bit Of Filthy Magic: Invisibility, And The Anaesthetic Power To Deaden My Attention In Your Direction.

Reach Me A Gentian, Give Me A Torch! Let Me Guide Myself With The Blue, Forked Torch Of This Flower

The Words Themselves Are Clean, So Are The Things To Which They Apply. But The Mind Drags In A Filthy Association, Calls Up Some Repulsive Emotion. Well, Then, Cleanse The Mind, That Is The Real Job. It Is The Mind Which Is The Augean Stables, Not Language.

Democracy And Equality Try To Denythe Mystic Recognition Of Difference And Innate Priority, The Joy Of Obedience And The Sacred Responsibility Of Authority.

It Seems To Me That The Chief Thing About A Woman - Who Is Much Of A Woman - Is That In The Long Run She Is Not To Be Had... She Is Not To Be Caught By Any Of The Catch-words, Love, Beauty, Honor, Duty, Worth, Work, Salvation - None Of Them - Not In The Long Run. In The Long Run She Only Says Am I Satisfied, Or Is There Some Beastly Dissatisfaction Gnawing And Gnawing Inside Me. And If There Is Some Dissatisfaction, It Is Physical, At Least As Much As Psychic, Sex As Much As Soul.

I Should Like [people] To Like The Purely Individual Thing In Themselves, Which Makes Them Act In Singleness. And They Only Like To Do The Collective Thing.

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.

The More I See Of Democracy The More I Dislike It. It Just Brings Everything Down To The Mere Vulgar Level Of Wages And Prices, Electric Light And Water Closets, And Nothing Else.

The Sense Of Wonder, That Is Our Sixth Sense.

Sense Of Wonder

Loud Peace Propaganda Makes War Seem Imminent.

I Got The Blues Thinking Of The Future, So I Left Off And Made Some Marmalade. It's Amazing How It Cheers One Up To Shred Orange And Scrub The Floor.

I Will Wait And Watch Till The Day Of David At Last Shall Be Finished, And Wisdom No More Fox-faced, And The Blood Gets Back Its Flame.

I Want Relations Which Are Not Purely Personal, Based On Purely Personal Qualities; But Relations Based Upon Some Unanimous Accord In Truth Or Belief, And A Harmony Of Purpose, Rather Than Of Personality. I Am Weary Of Personality. Let Us Be Easy And Impersonal, Not Forever Fingering Over Our Own Souls, And The Souls Of Our Acquaintances, But Trying To Create A New Life, A New Common Life, A New Complete Tree Of Life From The Roots That Are Within Us.

Not That The Red Indian Will Ever Possess The Broad Lands Of America. At Least I Presume Not. But His Ghost Will.

Native American

Recklessness Is Almost A Man's Revenge On His Woman. He Feels He Is Not Valued So He Will Risk Destroying Himself To Deprive Her Altogether.

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

You Don't Want To Love - Your Eternal And Abnormal Craving Is To Be Loved. You Aren't Positive, You're Negative. You Absorb, Absorb, As If You Must Fill Yourself Up With Love, Because You've Got A Shortage Somewhere.

A House O' Women Is As Dead As A House Wi' No Fire, To My Thinkin'. I'm Not A Spider As Likes To Corner Myself. I Like A Man About, If He's Only Something To Snap At.

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.

Mystic Equality Lies In Abstraction, Not In Having Or In Doing, Which Are Processes. In Function And Process, One Man, One Part, Must Of Necessity Be Subordinate To Another. It Is A Condition Of Being.

I Cannot Be A Materialist - But Oh, How Is It Possible That A God Who Speaks To All Hearts Can Let Belgravia Go Laughing To A Vicious Luxury, And Whitechapel Cursing To A Filthy Debauchery - Such Suffering, Such Dreadful Suffering - And Shall The Short Years Of Christ's Mission Atone For It All?

There Is No Evolving, Only Unfolding. The Lily Is In The Bit Of Dust Which Is Its Beginning, Lily And Nothing But Lily: And The Lily In Blossom Is A Ne Plus Ultra: There Is No Evolving Beyond.

The Map Appears To Us More Real Than The Land.

For My Part, I Prefer My Heart To Be Broken. It Is So Lovely, Dawn-kaleidoscopic Within The Crack.

There Is An Eternal Vital Correspondence Between Our Blood And The Sun: There Is An Eternal Vital Correspondence Between Our Nerves And The Moon. If We Get Out Of Contact And Harmony With The Sun And Moon, Then Both Turn Into Great Dragons Of Destruction Against Us.

There Is The Unknown And The Unknowable Which Propounds All Creation. This We Cannot Love , We Can Only Accept It As A Term Of Our Own Limitation And Ratification. We Can Only Know That From The Unknown, Profound Desires Enter In Upon Us, And That The Fulfilling Of These Desires Is The Fulfilling Of Creation.

It's Better To Be Born Lucky Than Rich. If You're Rich, You May Lose Your Money, But If You're Born Lucky, You Will Always Have More Money.

She Knew That The Horse, Born To Serve Nobly, Had Waited In Vain For Someone Noble To Serve. His Spirit Knew That Nobility Had Gone Out Of Men.

Be Still When You Have Nothing To Say; When Genuine Passion Moves You, Say What You've Got To Say, And Say It Hot.

Why, Oh Why Must One Grow Up, Why Must One Inherit This Heavy, Numbing Responsibility Of Living An Undiscovered Life? Out Of The Nothingness And The Undifferentiated Mass, To Make Something Of Herself! But What? In The Obscurity And Pathlessness To Take A Direction! But Whither? How Take Even One Step? And Yet, How Stand Still? This Was Torment Indeed, To Inherit The Responsibility Of One’s Own Life.

And Every True Artist Is The Salvation Of Every Other. But Only Artists Produce For Each Other The World That Is Fit To Live In.

She Wished Some Help Would Come From Outside. But In The Whole World There Was No Help. Society Was Terrible Because It Was Insane. Civilized Society Is Insane. Money And So-called Love Are Its Two Great Manias; Money A Long Way First. The Individual Asserts Himself In His Disconnected Insanity In These Two Modes: Money And Love.

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.

Thought Is A Man In His Wholeness, Wholly Attending.

I Would Like [the Working Man] To Give Me Back Books And Newspapers And Theories. And I Would Like To Give Him Back, In Return, His Old Insouciance, And Rich, Original Spontaneity And Fullness Of Life.

Fullness Of Life

How Beautiful Maleness Is, If It Finds Its Right Expression.

Whether I Get On In The World Is A Question; But I Certainly Don't Get On Very Well With The World.

Men Fight For Liberty And Win It With Hard Knocks. Their Children, Brought Up Easy, Let It Slip Away Again, Poor Fools. And Their Grandchildren Are Once More Slaves.

And If Tonight My Soul May Find Her Peace In Sleep, And Sink In Good Oblivion, And In The Morning Wake Like A New-opened Flower Then I Have Been Dipped Again In God, And New-created.

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.

I Think I Am Much Too Valuable A Creature To Offer Myself To A German Bullet Gratis And For Fun.

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.

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.

Men! The Only Animal In The World To Fear.

Instead Of Chopping Yourself Down To Fit The World, Chop The World Down To Fit Yourself.

It Is Marriage, Perhaps, Which Had Given Man The Best Of His Freedom, Given Him His Little Kingdom Of His Own Within The Big Kingdom Of The State.... It Is A True Freedom Because It Is A True Fulfilment, For Man, Woman And Children. Do We Then Want To Break Marriage? If We Do Break It, It Means We All Fall To A Far Greater Extent Under The Direct Sway Of The State.

I Hate The Actor And Audience Business. An Author Should Be In Among The Crowd, Kicking Their Shins Or Cheering Them On To Some Mischief Or Merriment.

He Who Gets Nearer The Sun Is Leader, The Aristocrat Of Aristocrats, Or He Who, Like Dostoevsky, Gets Nearest The Moon Of Our Non-being.

She Herself Had Never Been Able To Be Altogether Herself: It Had Been Denied Her.

God Doesn't Know Things. He Is Things.

I Shall Always Be A Priest Of Love.

Man Has Little Needs And Deeper Needs. We Have Fallen Into The Mistake Of Living From Our Little Needs Till We Have Almost Lost Our Deeper Needs In A Sort Of Madness.

The Feelings I Don't Have I Don't Have. The Feelings I Don't Have, I Won't Say I Have. The Felings You Say You Have, You Don't Have. The Feelings You Would Like Us Both To Have, We Neither Of Us Have.

Money Is Our Madness, Our Vast Collective Madness.

I Don't Believe Any More In Democracy. But I Can't Believe In The Old Sort Of Aristocracy, Either, Nor Can I Wish It Back, Splendid As It Was. What I Believe In Is The Old Homeric Aristocracy, When The Grandeur Was Inside A Man, And He Lived In A Simple Wooden House.

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.

When The Emotional Soul Receives A Wounding Shock, The Soul Seems To Recover As The Body Recovers. But This Is Only In Appearance. Slowly, Slowly The Wound To The Soul Begins To Make Itself Felt, Like A Bruise, Which Only Slowly Deepens Its Terrible Ache, Till It Fills All The Psyche. And When We Think We Have Recovered And Forgotten, It Is Then That The Terrible After-effects Have To Be Encountered At Their Worst.

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

I Believe The Nearest I've Come To Perfect Love Was With A Young Coal-miner When I Was About 16.

Oh, For The Wonder That Bubbles Into My Soul.

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.

It's Not Art For Art's Sake, It's Art For My Sake.

The Picture Must All Come Out Of The Artist's Inside, Awareness Of Forms And Figures... It Is More Than Memory. It Is The Image As It Lives In The Consciousness, Alive Like A Vision, But Unknown.

Your Most Vital Necessity In This Life Is That You Shall Love Your Wife Completely And Implicitly And In An Entire Nakedness Of Body And Spirit.... This That I Tell You Is My Message As Far As I've Got Any.

Another Head - And A Black Alpaca Jacket And A Serviette This Time - To Tell Us Coffee Is Ready. Not Before It Is Time, Too.

This Is The Very Worst Wickedness, That We Refuse To Acknowledge The Passionate Evil That Is In Us. This Makes Us Secret And Rotten.

Anyone Who Is Kind To Man Knows The Fragmentariness Of Most Men, And Wants To Arrange A Society Of Power In Which Men Fall Naturally Into A Collective Wholeness, Since They Cannot Have An Individual Wholeness. In This Collective Wholeness They Will Be Fulfilled. But If They Make Efforts At Individual Fulfilment, They Must Fail For They Are By Nature Fragmentary.

I Want The Wonder Back Again, Or I Shall Die.

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.

Nobody Knows You. You Don't Know Yourself. And I, Who Am Half In Love With You, What Am I In Love With? My Own Imaginings?

A Snake Came To My Water Trough On A Hot, Hot Day, And I In Pajamas For The Heat, To Drink There.

We Are Dying, We Are Dying, Piecemeal Our Bodies Are Dying And Our Strength Leaves Us, And Our Soul Cowers Naked In The Dark Rain Over The Flood, Cowering In The Last Branches Of The Tree Of Our Life.

I'd Be Ashamed To See A Woman Walking Around With My Name-label On Her, Address And Railway Station, Like A Wardrobe Trunk.

When We Get Out Of The Glass Bottles Of Our Ego, And When We Escape Like Squirrels Turning In The Cages Of Our Personality And Get Into The Forests Again, We Shall Shiver With Cold And Fright But Things Will Happen To Us So That We Don't Know Ourselves. Cool, Unlying Life Will Rush In, And Passion Will Make Our Bodies Taut With Power, We Shall Stamp Our Feet With New Power And Old Things Will Fall Down, We Shall Laugh, And Institutions Will Curl Up Like Burnt Paper.

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!

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

Is Our Day Of Creative Life Finished? Does There Remain To Us Only The Strange, Awful Afterwards Of The Knowledge In Dissolution,the African Knowledge, But Different For Us, Who Are Blond And Blue-eyed From The North?.... There Was Another Way, The Way Of Freedom. There Was The Paradisal Entry Into Pure, Single Beingwhich Accepted The Obligation Of The Permanent Connection With Others, And With The Other, Submits To The Yoke And Leash Of Love, But Never Forfeits Its Own Proud Individual Singleness, Even While It Loves And Yields.

Oh The Innocent Girl In Her Maiden Teens Knows Perfectly Well What Everything Means.

It Is No Good Casting Out Devils. They Belong To Us, We Must Accept Them And Be At Peace With Them.

The English People On The Whole Are Surely The Nicest People In The World, And Everybody Makes Everything So Easy For Everyone Else, That There Is Almost Nothing To Resist At All.

Humanity Is Less, Far Less Than The Individual, Because The Individual May Sometimes Be Capable Of Truth, And Humanity Is A Tree Of Lies.

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.

They Were Evidently Small Men, All Wind And Quibbles, Flinging Out Their Chuffy Grain To Us With Far Less Interest Than A Farm-wife Feels As She Scatters Corn To Her Fowls.

My Wife Has A Beastly Habit Of Comparing Poetry -- All Literature In Fact -- To The Droppings Of The Goats Among The Rocks -- Mere Excreta That Fertilises The Ground It Falls On.

If We Lose Our Sanity ... We Can But Howl The Lugubrious Howl Of Idiots, The Howl Of The Utterly Lost Howling Their Nowhereness.

Was His Life Nothing? Had He Nothing To Show, No Work? He Did Not Count His Work, Anyone Could Have Done It. What Had He Known, But The Long, Marital Embrace With His Wife. Curious, That This Was What His Life Amounted To! At Any Rate, It Was Something, It Was Eternal. He Would Say So To Anybody, And Be Proud Of It. He Lay With His Wife In His Arms, And She Was Still His Fulfillment, Just The Same As Ever. And That Was The Be-all And The End-all. Yes, And He Was Proud Of It.

The Man Who Had Died Looked Nakedly On Life, And Saw A Vast Resoluteness Everywhere Flinging Itself Up In Stormy Or Subtle Wave-crests.... Always The Man Who Had Died Saw Not The Bird Alone, But The Short, Sharp Wave Of Life Of Which The Bird Was The Crest.

[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.

Brave People Add Up To An Aristocracy. The Democracy Of Thou-shalt-not Is Bound To Be A Collection Of Weak Men.

No Form Of Love Is Wrong, So Long As It Is Love.

Why, Why Are People All Balls Of Bitter Dust? Because They Won't Fall Off The Tree When They're Ripe. They Hang On To Their Old Positions When The Position Is Overpast, Till They Become Infested With Little Worms And Dry-rot.

And What's Romance? Usually, A Nice Little Tale Where You Have Everything As You Like It, Where Rain Never Wets Your Jacket And Gnats Never Bite Your Nose And It's Always Daisy-time.

You Will Not Easily Get A Man To Believe That His Carnal Love For The Woman He Has Made His Wife Is As High A Love As That He Feltfor His Mother Or Sister.

I Believe A Man Is Born First Unto Himself - For The Happy Developing Of Himself, While The World Is A Nursery, And The Pretty Things Are To Be Snatched For, And Pleasant Things Tasted; Some People Seem To Exist Thus Right To The End. But Most Are Born Again On Entering Manhood; Then They Are Born To Humanity, To A Consciousness Of All The Laughing, And The Never-ceasing Murmur Of Pain And Sorrow That Comes From The Terrible Multitudes Of Brothers.

Naught Is Possessed, Neither Gold, Nor Land Nor Love, Nor Life, Nor Peace, Nor Even Sorrow Nor Death, Nor Yet Salvation. Say Of Nothing: It Is Mine. Say Only: It Is With Me.

Love Is The Hastening Gravitation Of Spirit Towards Spirit, And Body Towards Body, In The Joy Of Creation.

There's Nothing Wrong With Sexual Feelings In Themselves, So Long As They Are Straightforward And Not Sneaking Or Sly. The Right Sort Of Sex Stimulus Is Invaluable To Human Daily Life. Without It The World Grows Grey.

I Love Italian Opera - It's So Reckless. Damn Wagner, And His Bellowings At Fate And Death. Damn Debussy, And His Averted Face. I Like The Italians Who Run All On Impulse, And Don't Care About Their Immortal Souls, And Don't Worry About The Ultimate.

Paris Was Sad. One Of The Saddest Towns: Weary Of Its Now-mechanical Sensuality, Weary Of The Tension Of Money, Money, Money, Weary Even Of Resentment And Conceit, Just Weary To Death, And Still Not Sufficiently Americanized Or Londonized To Hide The Weariness Under A Mechanical Jig-jig-jig!

In The Short Summer Night She Learned So Much. She Would Have Thought A Woman Would Have Died Of Shame... She Felt, Now, She Had Come To The Real Bedrock Of Her Nature, And Was Essentially Shameless. She Was Her Sensual Self, Naked An Unashamed. She Felt A Triumph, Almost A Vainglory. So! That Was How It Was! That Was Life! That Was How Onself Really Was! There Was Nothing Left To Disguise Or Be Ashamed Of. She Shared Her Ultimate Nakedness With A Man, Another Being.

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

How Can Any Man Be Free Without A Soul Of His Own, That He Believes In And Won't Sell At Any Price?

Anatomy Presupposes A Corpse; Psychology Presupposes A World Of Corpses.

When Man Has Nothing But His Will To Assert--even His Good-will--it Is Always Bullying. Bolshevism Is One Sort Of Bullying, Capitalism Another: And Liberty Is A Change Of Chains.

The Trees Down The Boulevard Stand Naked In Thought, Their Abundant Summery Wordage Silenced, Caught In The Grim Undertow; Naked The Trees Confront Implacable Winter's Long, Cross-questioning Brunt.

In Every Great Novel, Who Is The Hero All The Time? Not Any Of The Characters, But Some Unnamed And Nameless Flame Behind Them All.

If We Sip The Wine, We Find Dreams Coming Upon Us Out Of The Imminent Night

The Great Pagan World Of Which Egypt And Greece Were The Last Living Termsonce Had A Vast And Perhaps Perfect Science Of Itsown, A Science In Terms Of Life. In Our Era This Science Crumbled Into Magic And Charlatanry. But Even Wisdom Crumbles.

It's Hard To Ravish A Tin Of Sardines.

I Can't Do With Mountains At Close Quarters - They Are Always In The Way, And They Are So Stupid, Never Moving And Never Doing Anything But Obtrude Themselves.

Men And Women Should Stay Apart, Till Their Hearts Grow Gentle Towards One Another Again.

A Man And A Woman Are New To One Another Throughout A Life-time, In The Rhythm Of Marriage That Matches The Rhythm Of The Year. Sex Is The Balance Of Male And Female In The Universe, The Attraction, The Repulsion, The Transit Of Neutrality, The New Attraction, The Repulsion, Always Different, Always New.

A Little Morphine In All The Air. It Would Be Wonderfully Refreshing For Everyone.

The True Unconscious Is The Well-head, The Fountain Of Real Motivity. The Sex Of Which Adam And Eve Became Conscious Derived Fromthe Very God Who Bade Them Be Not Conscious Of It.

In Masturbation There Is Nothing But Loss.

Art- Speech Is The Only Truth. An Artist Is Usually A Damned Liar But His Art, If It Be Art, Will Tell You The Truth Of His Day And That Is All That Matters. Away With Eternal Truth. The Truth Lives From Day To Day, And The Marvelous Plato Of Yesterday Is Chiefly Bosh Today.

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

The Mind Can Assert Anything And Pretend It Has Proved It. My Beliefs I Test On My Body, On My Intuitional Consciousness, And When I Get A Response There, Then I Accept.

A Woman Unsatisfied Must Have Luxuries. But A Woman Who Loves A Man Would Sleep On A Board

It's Autumn And Everybody Feels Like A Disembodied Spirit Then.

The Acrid Scents Of Autumn, Reminiscent Of Slinking Beasts, Make Me Fear

You Live By What You Thrill To, And There's The End Of It.

One Man Isn't Any Better Than Another, Not Because They Are Equal, But Because They Are Intrinsically Other, That There Is No Termof Comparison.

Far Back, Far Back In Our Dark Soul The Horse Prances.

They Lived Freely Among The Students, They Argued With The Men Over Philosophical, Sociological And Artistic Matters, They Were Just As Good As The Men Themselves: Only Better, Since They Were Women.

In Every Living Thing There Is The Desire For Love.

Sleep Is A Hint Of Lovely Oblivion.

One Can No Longer Live With People: It Is Too Hideous And Nauseating. Owners And Owned, They Are Like The Two Sides Of A Ghastly Disease.

Sometimes Life Takes Hold Of One, Carries The Body Along, Accomplishes One's History, And Yet Is Not Real, But Leaves Oneself As It Were Slurred Over.

America Is Neither Free Nor Brave, But A Land Of Tight, Iron-clanking Little Wills, Everybody Trying To Put It Over Everybody Else, And A Land Of Men Absolutely Devoid Of The Real Courage Of Trust, Trust In Life's Sacred Spontaneity. They Can't Trust Life Until They Can Control It.

I Can Give You A Spirit Love, I Have Given You This Long, Long Time; But Not Embodied Passion. See, You Are A Nun. I Have Given You What I Would Give A Holy Nun...in All Our Relations No Body Enters. I Do Not Talk To You Through The Senses - Rather Through The Spirit. That Is Why We Cannot Love In The Common Sense.

You'll Never Succeed In Idealizing Hard Work. Before You Can Dig Mother Earth You've Got To Take Off Your Ideal Jacket. The Harder A Man Works, At Brute Labor, The Thinner Becomes His Idealism, The Darker His Mind.

The World Is A Raving Idiot, And No Man Can Kill It: Though I’ll Do My Best. But You’re Right. We Must Rescue Ourselves As Best We Can.

But The Effort, The Effort! And As The Marrow Is Eaten Out Of A Man's Bones And The Soul Out Of His Belly, Contending With The Strange Rapacity Of Savage Life, The Lower Stage Of Creation, He Cannot Make The Effort Any More.

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

Money Is The Seal And Stamp Of Success.

Literature Is A Toil And A Snare, A Curse That Bites Deep.

The World Is Wonderful And Beautiful And Good Beyond One's Wildest Imagination.

The Tiny Fish Enjoy Themselves In The Sea.

In America The Chief Accusation Seems To Be One Of "eroticism." This Is Odd, Rather Puzzling To My Mind. Which Eros? Eros Of The Jaunty "amours," Or Eros Of The Sacred Mysteries? And If The Latter, Why Accuse, Why Not Respect, Even Venerate?

Nobody Can Have The Soul Of Me. My Mother Has Had, And Nobody Can Have It Again. Nobody Can Come Into My Very Self Again, And Breathe Me Like An Atmosphere.

Men Are Not Free When They're Doing Just What They Like. Men Are Only Free When They're Doing What The Deepest Self Likes. And There Is Getting Down To The Deepest Self! It Takes Some Diving.

The Profoundest Of All Sensualities Is The Sense Of Truth And The Next Deepest Sensual Experience Is The Sense Of Justice.

For Even Satire Is A Form Of Sympathy. It Is The Way Our Sympathy Flows And Recoils That Really Determines Our Lives. And Here Lies The Vast Importance Of The Novel, Properly Handled. It Can Inform And Lead Into New Places Our Sympathy Away In Recoil From Things Gone Dead. Therefore The Novel, Properly Handled, Can Reveal The Most Secret Places Of Life: For It Is The Passional Secret Places Of Life, Above All, That The Tide Of Sensitive Awareness Needs To Ebb And Flow, Cleansing And Freshening.

It Is Quite True, As Some Poets Said, That The God Who Created Man Must Have Had A Sinister Sense Of Humor, Creating Him A Reasonable Being, Yet Forcing Him To Take This Ridiculous Posture, And Driving Him With Blind Craving For This Ridiculous Performance.

I Should Think The American Admiration Of Five-minute Tourists Has Done More To Kill The Sacredness Of Old European Beauty And Aspiration Than Multitudes Of Bombs Would Have Done.

Go Deeper Than Love, For The Soul Has Greater Depths, Love Is Like The Grass, But The Heart Is Deep Wild Rock Molten, Yet Dense And Permanent. Go Down To Your Deep Old Heart, And Lose Sight Of Yourself. And Lose Sight Of Me, The Me Whom You Turbulently Loved. Let Us Lose Sight Of Ourselves, And Break The Mirrors. For The Fierce Curve Of Our Lives Is Moving Again To The Depths Out Of Sight, In The Deep Living Heart.

Sing Then The Core Of Dark And Absolute Oblivion Where The Soul At Last Is Lost In Utter Peace.

You're Always Begging Things To Love You," He Said, "as If You Were A Beggar For Love. Even The Flowers, You Have To Fawn On Them--

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