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I am only half there when I am ill, and so there is only half a man to suffer. To suffer in one's whole self is so great a violation, that it is not to be endured.
D. H. Lawrence
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I'd wipe the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake.
D. H. Lawrence
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Imitate the magnificent trees that speak no word of their rapture, but only breathe largely the luminous breeze.
D. H. Lawrence
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Don't talk to me any more about poetry for months -- unless it is other men's work. I really love verse, even rubbish. But I'm fearfully busy at a novel, and brush all the gossamer of verse off my face.
D. H. Lawrence
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Life is beautiful, as long as it consumes you. When it is rushing through you, destroying you, life is gorgeous, glorious. It's when you burn a slow fire and save fuel, that life's not worth having.
D. H. Lawrence
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Another head - and a black alpaca jacket and a serviette this time - to tell us coffee is ready. Not before it is time, too.
D. H. Lawrence
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That's how women are with me " said Paul. "They want me like mad but they don't want to belong to me.
D. H. Lawrence
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Obscenity only comes in when the mind despises and fears the body, and the body hates and resists the mind.
D. H. Lawrence
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Let there be an end ... of all this welter of pity, which is only self-pity reflected onto some obvious surface.
D. H. Lawrence
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But the act, called the sexual act, is not for the depositing of seed. It is for leaping off into the unknown, as from a cliff's edge, like Sappho into the sea.
D. H. Lawrence
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What a frail, easily hurt, rather pathetic thing a human body is, naked; somehow a little unfinished, incomplete!
D. H. Lawrence
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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--
D. H. Lawrence
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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.
D. H. Lawrence
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If only we could live two lives: the first in which to make one's mistakes, and the second in which to profit by them.
D. H. Lawrence
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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.
D. H. Lawrence
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Without secrecy there would be no pornography. But secrecy and modesty are two utterly different things.
D. H. Lawrence
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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.
D. H. Lawrence
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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.
D. H. Lawrence
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Why were we driven out of Paradise? Why did we fall into this gnawing disease of unappeasable dissatisfaction? Not because we sinned. Ah, no. All the animals in Paradise enjoyed the sensual passion of coition. Not because we sinned. But because we got sex into our head.
D. H. Lawrence
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A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.
D. H. Lawrence
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America does to me what I knew it would do: it just bumps me. The people charge at you like trucks coming down on you -- no awareness. But one tries to dodge aside in time. Bump! bump! go the trucks. And that is human contact.
D. H. Lawrence
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America exhausts the springs of one's soul - I suppose that's what it exists for. It lives to see all real spontaneity expire. But anyhow it doesn't grind on an old nerve as Europe seems to.
D. H. Lawrence
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Evil, what is evil? There is only one evil, to deny life As Rome denied Etruria And mechanical America Montezuma still
D. H. Lawrence
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And all the time she felt the reflection of his hopelessness in her. She couldn't quite, quite love in hoplessness. And he, being hopeless, couldn't ever love at all.
D. H. Lawrence
