One could laugh at the world better if it didn’t mix tender kindliness with its brutality.
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.
His maleness bores me. Nothing is so boring as the phallus, so inherently stupid and stupidly conceited.
Nothingness! To accept the great nothingness of life seemed to be the one end of living. All the many busy and important little things that make up the grand sum-total of nothingness!
I want you to treat me nicely and respectfully.” “Call you ‘sir’, perhaps?” she asked quietly. “Yes, call me ‘sir’. I should love it.” “Then I wish you would go upstairs, sir.
All our troubles, says somebody wise, come upon us because we cannot be alone.
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.
Some things can’t be ravished. You can’t ravish a tin of sardines. And so many women are like that: and men. But the earth... !
Every man has made a ghastly fool of himself with a woman at some time or other.
The mosquito knows full well, small as he is he’s a beast of prey. But after all he only takes his bellyful, he doesn’t put my blood in the bank.
It’s no good trying to get rid of your aloneness. You’ve got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they’ve got to come. You can’t force them.
We need not feel ashamed of flirting with the zodiac. The zodiac is well worth flirting with.
John Thomas says good-night to Lady Jane, a little droopingly, but with a hopeful heart.
You musn’t mind people so much. They’re not being disagreeable to you – it’s their way. You always think people are meaning things for you. But they don’t.
She was old; millions of years old, she felt. And at last, she could bear the burden of herself no more.
Always these arrangements! Always one’s life arranged for one! Wheels that worked one and drove one, and over which one had no real control!
Different places on the face of the earth have different vital effluence, different vibration, different chemical exhalation, different polarity with different stars: call it what you like. But the spirit of place is a great reality.