OURS IS ESSENTIALLY A tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habits, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
Loc. 550-51
...
In fact everything was a little ridiculous, or very ridiculous: certainly everything connected with authority, whether it were in the army or the government or the universities, was ridiculous to a degree. And as far as the governing class made any pretensions to govern, they were ridiculous too.
Loc. 636-38
...
Well, there it was: fated like the rest of things! It was rather awful, but why kick? You couldn’t kick it away. It just went on. Life, like all the rest! On the low dark ceiling of cloud at night red blotches burned and quavered, dappling and swelling and contracting, like burns that give pain. It was the furnaces. At first they fascinated Connie with a sort of horror; she felt she was living underground. Then she got used to them. And in the morning it rained.
Loc. 692-95
...What the eye doesn’t see and the mind doesn’t know, doesn’t exist.
Loc. 778-79
...The bitch-goddess, as she is called, of Success, roamed, snarling and protective, round the half-humble, half-defiant Michaelis’ heels, and intimidated Clifford completely: for he wanted to prostitute himself to the bitch-goddess Success.
Loc. 836-38
...
Oh, you’re quite right, you’re quite right! The life of the mind needs a comfortable house and decent cooking. You’re quite right. It even needs posterity. But it all hinges on the instinct for success. That is the pivot on which all things turn.”
Loc. 1032-34
...
The only thing that is a unit, non-organic, composed of many different, and equally essential parts, is the machine. Each man a machine-part, and the driving power of the machine, hate ... hate of the bourgeois. That, to me, is Bolshevism.”
Loc. 1143-45
...Perhaps the human soul needs excursions, and must not be denied them. But the point of an excursion is that you come home again.
Loc. 1256-57
...
How could one say Yes? For years and years? The little yes, gone on a breath! Why should one be pinned down by that butterfly word? Of course it had to flutter away and be gone, to be followed by other yes’s and no’s! Like the straying of butterflies.
Loc. 1275-76
D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover.
