The voices / 163 fragments

D.H. Lawrence

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Archive entries

01Undated

Be as promiscuous as the rabbits!' said Hammond. 'Why not? What's wrong with rabbits? Are they any worse than a neurotic, revolutionary humanity, full of nervous hate?

D.H. Lawrence / quote

02Undated

Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to about the same thing.

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03Undated

But you don't fuck me cold-heartedly,' she protested.'I don't want to fuck you at all.'Lady Chatterly's Lover

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04Undated

To be alive, to be man alive, to be whole man alive: that is the point. And at its best, the novel, and the novel supremely, can help you. It can help you not to be dead man in life.

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05Undated

Connie’s man could be a bit sulky, and Hilda’s a bit jeering. But that is how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don’t have them they hate you because you won’t; and when you do have them they hate you again, for some other reason. Or for no reason at all, except that they are discontented children, and can’t be satisfied whatever they get, let a woman do what she may.

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06Undated

Man is willing to accept woman as an equal, as a man in skirts, as an angel, a devil, a baby-face, a machine, an instrument, a bosom, a womb, a pair of legs, a servant, an encyclopaedia, an ideal or an obscenity; the one thing he won’t accept her as, is a human being, a real human being of the feminine sex.

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07Undated

The final fact being that at the very bottom of his soul he was an outsider, and anti-social, and he accepted the fact inwardly, no matter how Bond-Streety he was on the outside. His isolation was a necessity to him; just as the appearance of conformity and mixing-in with the smart people was also a necessity.

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08Undated

In every living thing there is the desire for love.

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09Undated

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

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10Undated

When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.

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11Undated

The days passed, the weeks. But everything seemed to have fused, gone into a conglomerated mass. He could not tell one day from another, hardly one place from another. Nothing was distinct or distinguishable. Often he lost himself for an hour at a time, could not remember what he had done.

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12Undated

And she shrank away again, back into her darkness, and for a long while remained blotted safely away from living.

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13Undated

All the great words, it seemed to Connie were cancelled, for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead now and dying from day to day.

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14Undated

But that is how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don't have them they hate you because you won't; and when you do have them they hate you again, for some other reason. Or for no reason at all, except that they are discontented children, and can't be satisfied whatever they get, let a woman do what she may.

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15Undated

I only want one thing of men, and that is, that they should leave me alone.

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16Undated

That’s the place to get to—nowhere. One wants to wander away from the world’s somewheres, into our own nowhere.

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17Undated

Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe. The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass.

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18Undated

The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few in most personal experience. There's lots of good fish in the sea... maybe... but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you're not mackerel or herring yourself, you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.

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19Undated

The mighty question arises upon us, what is one's own real self? It certainly is not what we think we are and ought to be.

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20Undated

You are the call and I am the answer,You are the wish, and I the fulfilment,You are the night, and I the day. What else? It is perfect enough. It is perfectly complete. You and I, What more—? Strange, how we suffer in spite of this!

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21Undated

So he was always in the town at one place or another, drinking, knocking about with the men he knew. It really wearied him. He talked to barmaids, to almost any woman, but there was that dark, strained look in his eyes, as if he were hunting something.Everything seemed so different, so unreal. There seemed no reason why people should go along the street, and houses pile up in the daylight. There seemed no reason why these things should occupy the space, instead of leaving it empty. His friends talked to him: he heard the sounds, and he answered. But why there should be the noise of speech he could not understand.

D.H. Lawrence / quote

22Undated

I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.and it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self,and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can helpand patience, and a certain difficult repentancelong difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneselffrom the endless repetition of the mistakewhich mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.

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23Undated

It was like something lurking in the darkness within him...There is remained in the darkness, the great pain, tearing him at times, and then being silent.

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24Undated

A young man is afraid of his demon and pulls his hand over the demon's mouth sometimes and speaks for him.

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