"Connie felt again the tightness, niggardliness of the men of her generation. They were so tight, so scared of life!"

"California is a queer place in a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific. It is absolutely selfish, very empty, but not false, and at least, not full of false effort."

"You roll me out flat."

"The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute."

"One sheds one's sicknesses in books - repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them."

"The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters - not to talk in armies and nations and numbers - but to track it home."

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

"You don't want to love - your eternal and abnormal craving is to be loved. You aren't positive, you're negative. You absorb, absorb, as if you must fill yourself up with love, because you've got a shortage somewhere."

"There is no such thing as liberty. You only change one sort of domination for another. All we can do is to choose our master."

"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."

"Nothing that comes from the deep, passional soul is bad, or can be bad."

"I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets."

"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."

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

"If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule."

"This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten."

"He felt if he could not be alone, and if he could not be left alone, he would die."

"Oh, I've no patience with these romances. They're the ruin of all order. It's a thousand pities they ever happened."

"Nobody knows you.You don't know yourself.And I, who am half in love with you,What am I in love with?My own imaginings?"

"I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps."

"As for sex, the last of the great words, it was just a cocktail term for an excitement that bucked you up for a while, then left you more raggy than ever."

"Life is a travelling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken."

"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 out the same? Always the shining doorway ahead; and then, upon approach, always the shining doorway was a gate into another ugly yard, dirty and active and dead. Always the crest of the hill gleaming ahead under heaven: and then, from the top of the hill only another sordid valley full of amorphous, squalid activity."

"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!"

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

"I shall always be a priest of love."

"He toasted his bacon on a fork and caught the drops of fat on his bread; then he put the rasher on his thick slice of bread, and cut off chunks with a clasp-knife, poured his tea into his saucer, and was happy."

"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically."

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

"Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!"

"Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer."

"Only in a novel are all things given full play."

"I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment."

"The American grips himself, at the very sources of his consciousness, in a grip of care: and then, to so much of the rest of life, is indifferent. Whereas, the European hasn't got so much care in him, so he cares much more for life and living."

"Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art - or almost the only stuff."

"I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself."

"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 sleek, cool-fleshed fruit. Cherries touched his ears and his neck as he stretched forward, their chill fingertips sending a flash down his blood. All shades of red, from a golden vermilion to a rich crimson, glowed and met his eyes under a darkness of leaves."

"We are so overwhelmed with quantities of books, that we hardly realize any more that a book can be valuable, valuable like a jewel, or a lovely picture, into which you can look deeper and deeper and get a more profound experience very time. It is far, far better to read one book six times, at intervals, than to read six several books."

"She did not understand the beauty he found in her, through touch upon her living secret body, almost the ecstasy of beauty. For passion alone is awake to it. And when passion is dead, or absent, then the magnificent throb of beauty is incomprehensible and even a little despicable; warm, live beauty of contact, so much deeper than the beauty of vision."

"Oh build your ship of death, oh build it in time and build it lovingly, and put it between the hands of your soul."

"Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved."

"Men and women should stay apart, till their hearts grow gentle towards one another again."

"I never knew how soothing trees are - many trees and patches of open sunlight and tree presences it is almost like having another being."

"Was his life nothing? Had he nothing to show, no work? He did not count his work, anyone could have done it. What had he known, but the long, marital embrace with his wife. Curious, that this was what his life amounted to! At any rate, it was something, it was eternal. He would say so to anybody, and be proud of it. He lay with his wife in his arms, and she was still his fulfillment, just the same as ever. And that was the be-all and the end-all. Yes, and he was proud of it."

"She was only really a female to him.But perhaps that was better. And after all, he was kind to the female in her, which no man had ever been. Men were very kind to the person she was, but rather cruel to the female, despising her or ignoring her altogether. Men were awfully kind to Constance Reid or to Lady Chatterley; but not to her womb they weren't kind. And he took no notice of Constance or of Lady Chatterley; he just softly stroked her loins or her breasts."

"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 happen to usso that we don't know ourselves.Cool, unlying life will rush in,and passion will make our bodies taut with power,we shall stamp our feet with new powerand old things will fall down,we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up likeburnt paper."

"Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep."

"The young Cambridge group the group that stood for "freedom" and flannel trousers and flannel shirts open at the neck and a well-bred sort of emotional anarchy and a whispering murmuring sort of voice and an ultra-sensitive sort of manner."

"The proper study of mankind is man in his relation to his deity."

"The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death."