Here, on the farther shore of the sunset, with the flushed tide at his feet, and the large star flashing with strange laughter, did he himself naked walk with lifted arms into the quiet flood of life.
Shame, what was it? It was part of extreme delight. It was that part of delight of which man is usually afraid. Why afraid? The secret, shameful things are most terribly beautiful.
She was half watching, half musing. It was her constant state. Her eyes were keen and observant, but her inner mind took no notice of what she saw.
How terrible it was that it should be spring, and everything cold-hearted, cold-hearted.
He had so very nearly lost his life, that what remained was wonderfully precious to him.
Lemon trees, like Italians, seem to be happiest when they are touching one another.
You can’t lose yourself, neither in woman nor humanity nor in God. You’ve always got yourself on your hands in the end: and a very raw and jaded and humiliated and nervous-neurasthenic self it is, too, in the end.
He had become a settled effect in her spirit, a state permanently established, not continuous, but always recurring.
You live most intensely in human contact- and that’s what we shrink from, poor timid creatures, from giving our souls to somebody to touch; for they, bungling fools, will generally paw it with dirty hands.
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.
He felt again irresistibly drawn to her. He felt there was a secret bond, a secret thread between him and her, something very exclusive, which shut out everybody else and made him and her possess each other in secret.
One wonders what the proper high-brow Romans... read into the strange utterances of Lucretius or Apuleius or Tertullian, Augustine or Athanasius. The uncanny voice of Iberian Spain, the weirdness of old Carthage, the passion of Libya and North Africa.
It was as if she could scarcely stand the shock of physical love, even a passionate kiss, and then he was too shrinking and sensitive to give it.
In his dark eyes was a deep misery which he wore with the same ease and pleasantness as he wore his close-sitting clothes.
Better a thousand times take one’s chance with death, than accept a life one did not want.
To Connie, everything in her world and life seemed worn out, and her dissatisfaction was older than the hills.
She did not know why she could not move. It was as in a dream when the heart strains and the body cannot stir.
My shoes are made of Spanish leather, My socks are made of silk; I wear a ring on every finger, I wash myself in milk.
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.
Her absorption was strange, almost rhapsodic. Both Birkin and Ursula were suspended. The little red pistillate flowers had some strange, almost mystic-passionate attraction for her.