Sons and Lovers - D. H. Lawerence

• She never got beyond the second page. He read a great deal and had a quick, active intelligence. She could understand nothing but love-making and chatter. He was accustomed to hating all his thoughts sifted through his mother’s mind; so, when he wanted companionship, and was asked in reply to be the billing and twittering lover, he hated his betrothed.

• He leaned with his back against the side of the chimney-piece, his hands in his pockets. He was a big, raw-boned man, who looked as if he would go to the world’s end if he wanted to. But she saw the despair on his face.

• But the girl gradually sought him out. If he brought up his sketch-book, it was she who pondered longest over the last picture Then she would look up at him. Suddenly, her dark eyes alight like water that shakes with a steam of gold in the dark, she would ask: “Why do I like this so?”

• Miriam loitered behind, alone. She did not fit in with the others; she could very rarely get into human relations with anyone: so her friend, her companion, her lover, was Nature. She saw the sun declining wanly. In the dusky, cold hedgerows were some red leaves. She lingered to gather them, tenderly, passionately. The love in her finger-tips caressed the leaves, the passion in her heart came to a glow upon the leaves.

• It was if his fretted, tortured soul, run hot by thwarted passion, jetted off these saying like sparks from electricity. She did not grasp anything he said. She only sat couched beneath his cruelty and his hatred of her.

• He hated her bitterly at that moment because he made her suffer. Love her! She knew he loved her. He really belonged to her. This about not loving her, physically, bodily, was a mere perversity on his part because he knew she loved him. He was stupid like a child. He belonged to her. His soul wanted her. She guessed somebody had been influencing him. She felt upon him the hardness, the foreignness of another influence.

• He had come back to his mother. Hers was the strongest tie in his life. When he thought round, Miriam shrank away. There was a vague, unreal feel about her. An nobody else mattered. There was one place in the world that stood solid and did not melt into unreality: the place where his mother was. Everybody else could grow shadowy, almost non-existent to him, but she could not. It was as if the pivot and pole of his life, from which he could not escape was his mother.

• Religion was fading into the background. He had shoveled away all the beliefs that would hamper him, had cleared the ground, and come more or less to the bedrock of belief that one should feel inside oneself for right and wrong, and should have the patience to gradually realize one’s God. Now life interested him more.

• “You never give it a chance,” she said, “Then suddenly all her passion of grief over him broke out. “But it does matter!” she cried. “And you ought to be happy, you ought to try to be happy, to live to be happy. How could I bear to think your life wouldn’t be a happy one!”

• To be rid of our individuality, which is our will, which is our effort—to live effortless, a kind of curious sleep—that is very beautiful, I think; that is our after-life—our immortality.