Sons and Lovers

By D. H. Lawrence QUOTATION: God doesn’t know things. He is things.
ATTRIBUTION: D.H. (David Herbert) Lawrence (1885–1930), British author. Originally published by Duckworth (1913). Sons and Lovers, ch. 8, Penguin Books (1989).

QUOTATION: Before he could kiss her, he must drive something out of himself.
ATTRIBUTION: D.H. (David Herbert) Lawrence (1885–1930), British author. Originally published by Duckworth (1913). Sons and Lovers, ch. 8, Penguin Books (1989).

QUOTATION: Only this shimmeriness is the real living. The shape is a dead crust. The shimmer is inside really.
ATTRIBUTION: D.H. (David Herbert) Lawrence (1885–1930), British author. Originally published by Duckworth (1913). Sons and Lovers, ch. 7, Penguin Books (1989).

QUOTATION: So long as you don’t feel life’s paltry and a miserable business, the rest doesn’t matter, happiness or unhappiness.
ATTRIBUTION: D.H. (David Herbert) Lawrence (1885–1930), British author. Originally published by Duckworth (1913). Sons and Lovers, ch. 10, Penguin Books (1989).

QUOTATION: He would not take that direction, to the darkness, to follow her. He walked towards the faintly humming, glowing town, quickly.
ATTRIBUTION: D.H. (David Herbert) Lawrence (1885–1930), British author. Originally published by Duckworth (1913). Sons and Lovers, ch. 15, Penguin Books (1989).

QUOTATION: Paul loved to sleep with his mother. Sleep is still most perfect, in spite of hygienists, when it is shared with a beloved.
ATTRIBUTION: D.H. (David Herbert) Lawrence (1885–1930), British author. Originally published by Duckworth (1913). Sons and Lovers, ch. 4, Penguin Books (1989).

QUOTATION: They had met, and included in their meeting the thrust of the manifold grass stems, the cry of the peewit, the wheel of the stars.
ATTRIBUTION: D.H. (David Herbert) Lawrence (1885–1930), British author. Originally published by Duckworth (1913). Sons and Lovers, ch. 13, Penguin Books (1989).

QUOTATION: Being the sons of mothers whose husbands had blundered rather brutally through their feminine sanctities, they were themselves too diffident and shy. They could easier deny themselves than incur any reproach from a woman; for a woman was like their mother, and they were full of the sense of their mother. They preferred themselves to suffer the misery of celibacy, rather than risk the other person.
ATTRIBUTION: D.H. (David Herbert) Lawrence (1885–1930), British author. Originally published by Duckworth (1913). Sons and Lovers, ch. 11, Penguin Books (1989).

QUOTATION: The difference between people isn’t in their class, but in themselves. Only from the middle classes one gets ideas, and from the common people—life itself, warmth. You feel their hates and loves.
ATTRIBUTION: D.H. (David Herbert) Lawrence (1885–1930), British author. Originally published by Duckworth (1913). Sons and Lovers, ch. 10, Penguin Books (1989).

QUOTATION: I think ... I have inside me a sort of answer to the want of today: to the real, deep want of the English people, not to just what they fancy they want. And gradually, I shall get my hold on them.
ATTRIBUTION: D.H. (David Herbert) Lawrence (1885–1930), British author. Letter, February 1, 1913, to writer and critic Edward Garnett. The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, vol. 1, ed. James T. Boulton (1979).