For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.

And who should have the money, indeed, if not your wives? They have everything to do with the money. What idea have you, but to waste it!””Women waste nothing–they couldn’t if they tried,” said Aaron...

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?...

Human desire is the criterion of all truth and all good. Truth does not lie beyond humanity, but is one of the products of the human mind and feeling. There is really nothing to fear....

In every living thing there is the desire for love.

When we really want to go for something better, we shall smash the old. Until then, any sort of proposal, or making proposals, is no more than a tiresome game for self-important people.

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

And they fear nothing, and they respect nothing, the young don’t.

It was not the passion that was new to her, it was the yearning adoration. She knew she had always feared it, for it left her helpless; she feared it still, lest if she adored...

If only you could tell them that living and spending isn’t the same thing.

But a democracy is bound in the end to be obscene, for it is composed of myriad disunited fragments, each fragment assuming to itself a false wholeness, a false individuality. Modern democracy is made up...

The profoundest of all sensualitiesis the sense of truthand the next deepest sensual experienceis the sense of justice.

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

And Clifford the same. All that talk! All that writing! All that wild struggling to push himself forwards! It was just insanity. And it was getting worse, really maniacal.Connie felt washed-out with fear. But at...

Yes, I do believe in something. I believe in being warm-hearted. Ibelieve especially in being warm-hearted in love, in fucking with awarm heart. I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the womentake...

The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul, angry or gentle. Anger is just, and pity is just, but judgement is never just.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.”(Letter to Cynthia Asquith, November 1913)

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

The last year of her college career was wheeling slowly round. She could see ahead her examination and her departure. She had the ash of disillusion gritting under her teeth. Would the next move turn...

Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps...

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...

Sleep seems to hammer out for me the logical conclusions of my vague days, and offer them to me as dreams.

The young man, perched insecurely in the slen­der branches, rocked till he felt slightly drunk, reached down the boughs, where the scarlet beady cherries hung thick underneath, and tore off handful after handful of the...

My God, these folks don’t know how to love — that’s why they love so easily.

A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it.

The dead don’t die. They look on and help.

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...

There is nothing to save, now all is lost,but a tiny core of stillness in the heartlike the eye of a violet.

She lived a good deal by herself, to herself, working, passing on from day to day, and always thinking, trying to lay hold on life, to grasp it in her own understanding. Her active living...

And yet – and yet – one’s kite will rise on the wind as far as ever one has string to let it go. It tugs and tugs and will go, and one is glad...

It was very still. The tree was tall and straggling. It had thrown its briers over a hawthorn-bush, and its long streamers trailed thick, right down to the grass, splashing the darkness everywhere with great...

Sleep is still most perfect, in spite of hygienists, when it is shared with a beloved. The warmth, the security and peace of soul, the utter comfort from the touch of the other, knits the...

It’s no good trying to get rid of your own 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...

And in this passion for understanding her soul lay close to his; she had him all to herself. But he must be made abstract first.

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place,...

Aren’t I enough for you?’ she asked.’No,’ he said. ‘You are enough for me, as far as a woman is concerned. You are all women to me. But I wanted a man friend, as eternal...

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...

Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste than Herman Melville.

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.

I WANT her though, to take the same from me.She touches me as if I were herself, her own.She has not realized yet, that fearful thing, thatI am the other,she thinks we are all of...

Life is ours to be spent, not tobe saved.

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

They stood together in a false intimacy, a nervous contact. And he was in love with her.

I am turned into a dream. I feel nothing, or I don’t know what I feel. Yet it seems to me I am happy.

Humanity is a huge aggregate lie, and a huge lie is less than a small truth. Humanity is less, far less than the individual because the individual may sometimes be capable of truth, and humanity...

She lost her illusions in the collapse of her sympathies.

When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego,and when we escape like squirrels turning in thecages of our personalityand get into the forests again,we shall shiver with cold and frightbut things will...

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

I should feel the air move against me, and feel the things I touched, instead of having only to look at them. I’m sure life is all wrong because it has become much too visual...

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....