D.H. Lawrence · 704 pages
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“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.”
― D.H. Lawrence, quote from The Complete Poems (Poetry Library)
“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?”
― D.H. Lawrence, quote from The Complete Poems (Poetry Library)
“What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody who wants to do us harm.
No, no, it is the three strange angels. Admit them, admit them.”
― D.H. Lawrence, quote from The Complete Poems (Poetry Library)
“Delivered helpless and amazed
From the womb of the All, I am
waiting dazed
For memory to be erased.
Then I shall know the Elysium
That lies outside the monstrous womb
Of time from out of which I come.”
― D.H. Lawrence, quote from The Complete Poems (Poetry Library)
“Gloire de Dijon
When she rises in the morning
I linger to watch her;
She spreads the bath-cloth underneath the window
And the sunbeams catch her
Glistening white on the shoulders,
While down her sides the mellow
Golden shadow glows as
She stoops to the sponge, and her swung breasts
Sway like full-blown yellow
Gloire de Dijon roses.
She drips herself with water, and her shoulders
Glisten as silver, they crumple up
Like wet and falling roses, and I listen
For the sluicing of their rain-dishevelled petals.
In the window full of sunlight
Concentrates her golden shadow
Fold on fold, until it glows as
Mellow as the glory roses.”
― D.H. Lawrence, quote from The Complete Poems (Poetry Library)
“So I lay on your breast for an obscure hour Feeling your fingers go Like a rhythmic breeze Over my hair, and tracing my brows, Till I knew you not from a little wind: — I wonder now if God allows Us only one moment of his keys. If only then You could have unlocked the moon on the night, And I baptized myself in the light Of your love; we both have entered then the white Pure passion, and never again.”
― D.H. Lawrence, quote from The Complete Poems (Poetry Library)
“You are the call and I am the answer,
You are the wish, and I the fulfillment,
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!”
― D.H. Lawrence, quote from The Complete Poems (Poetry Library)
“Keep thinking back about what Mum said about being real and the Velveteen Rabbit book (though frankly have had enough trouble with rabbits in this particular house). My favorite book, she claims of which I have no memory was about how little kids get one toy that they love more than all the others, and even when its fur has been rubbed off, and it's gone saggy with bits missing, the little child still thinks it's the most beautiful toy in the world, and can't bear to be parted from it.
That's how it works, when people really love each other, Mum whispered on the way out in the Debenhams lift, as if she was confessing some hideous and embarrassing secret. But, the thing is, darling, it doesn't happen to ones who have sharp edges, or break if they get dropped, or ones made of silly synthetic stuff that doesn't last. You have to be brave and let the other person know who you are and what you feel.”
― Helen Fielding, quote from Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
“J'aurai cru, moi, dit Jacques, que la liberté consistait à regarder en face les situations où l'on s'est mis de plein gré et à accepter toutes ses responsabilités. Mais çe n'est sans doute pas ton avis : tu condamnes la société capitaliste , et pourtant tu es fonctionnaire dans cette société, tu affiches une sympathie de principe pour les communistes : mais tu te gardes bien de t'engager, tu n 'as jamais voté. Tu méprises la classe bourgeoise et pourtant tu es bourgeois, fils et frère de bourgeois et tu vis comme un bourgeois.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, quote from The Age of Reason
“If you are baking a pie for your friends, and you read an article entitled 'How to Build a Chair' instead of a cookbook, you pie will probably end up tasting like wood and nails instead of like crust and fruity filling.”
― Lemony Snicket, quote from The Vile Village
“Here: an exercise in choice. Your choice. One of these tales is true.
She lived through the war. In 1959 she came to America. She now lives in a condo in Miami, a tiny French woman with white hair, with a daughter and a grand-daughter. She keeps herself to herself and smiles rarely, as if the weight of memory keeps her from finding joy.
Or that's a lie. Actually the Gestapo picked her up during a border crossing in 1943, and they left her in a meadow. First she dug her own grave, then a single bullet to the back of the skull.
Her last thought, before that bullet, was that she was four months' pregnant, and that if we do not fight to create a future there will be no future for any of us.
There is an old woman in Miami who wakes, confused, from a dream of the wind blowing the wildflowers in a meadow.
There are bones untouched beneath the warm French earth which dream of a daughter's wedding. Good wine is drunk. The only tears shed are happy ones.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders
“[She was] kept there in the sort of embrace a man gives to the dearest creature the world holds for him.”
― Louisa May Alcott, quote from Eight Cousins
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