Dh Lawrence Women In Love Quotes

But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.

Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world down to fit yourself.

I should feel the air move against me, and feel the things I touched, instead of having only to look at them. I'm sure life is all wrong because it has become much too visual - we can neither hear nor feel nor understand, we can only see. I'm sure that is entirely wrong.

That’s the place to get to—nowhere. One wants to wander away from the world’s somewheres, into our own nowhere.

Every true artist is the salvation of every other. Only artists produce for each other a world that is fit to live in.

I want us to be together without bothering about ourselves- to be really together because we ARE together, as if it were a phenomenon, not a thing we have to maintain by our own effort.

Don't you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?

And woman is the same as horses: two wills act in opposition inside her. With one will she wants to subject herself utterly. With the other she wants to bolt, and pitch her rider to perdition.

What one does in one's art, that is the breath of one's being. What one does in one's life, that is a bagatelle for the outsiders to fuss about.

They stood together in a false intimacy, a nervous contact. And he was in love with her.

Yes, I do believe in something. I believe in being warm-hearted. I believe especially in being warm-hearted in love, in fucking with a warm heart. I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the women take it warm-heartedly, everything would come all right. It's all this cold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy.

Now go away then, and leave me alone. I don't want any more of your meretricious persiflage.

She thought she loved, she thought she was full of love.

Man is a mistake. He must go.

She was not herself--she was not anything. She was something that is going to be--soon--soon--very soon. But as yet, she was only imminent.

For to desire is better than to possess, the finality of the end was dreaded as deeply as it was desired.

And besides, look at elder flowers and bluebells-they are a sign that pure creation takes place - even the butterfly. But humanity never gets beyond the caterpillar stage -it rots in the chrysalis, it never will have wings.It is anti-creation, like monkeys and baboons.

She lived a good deal by herself, to herself, working, passing on from day to day, and always thinking, trying to lay hold on life, to grasp it in her own understanding. Her active living was suspended, but underneath, in the darkness, something was coming to pass. If only she could break through the last integuments!

Have I interrupted a conversation?' she asked. 'No, only a complete silence,' said Birkin. 'Oh,' said Ursula, vaguely, absent.

I want to be gone out of myself, and you to be lost to yourself, so we are found different.

It is all possessions, possessions, bullying you and turning you into a generalisation. You must leave your surroundings sketchy, unfinished, so that you are never contained, never confined, never dominated from the outside.

You've got to lapse out before you can know what sensual reality is, lapse into unkowingness, and give up your volition...You've got to learn not-to-be before you can come into being.

But mankind is a dead tree, covered with fine brilliant galls of people.[..]And if it is so, why is it? she asked, hostile.They were rousing each other to a fine passion of opposition. Why, why are people all balls of bitter dust?Because they won't fall off the tree when they're ripe.They hang on to their old positions when the position is over-past, till they become infested with little worms and dry-rot.

They looked at each other and laughed, then looked away, filled with darkness and secrecy. Then they kissed and remembered the magnificence of the night. It was so magnificent, such an inheritance of a universe of dark reality, that they were afraid to seem to remember. They hid away the remembrance and the knowledge.

A woman cannot bear to feel empty and purposeless. But a man may take real pleasure in that feeling. A man can take real pride and satisfaction in pure negation: 'I am quite empty of feeling. I don't care the slightest bit in the world for anybody or anything except myself. But I do care for myself, and I'm going to survive in spite of them all, and I'm going to have my own success without caring the least in the world how I get it. Because I'm cleverer than they are, I'm cunninger than they are, even if I'm weak. I must build myself up proper protections, and entrench myself, and then I'm safe. I can sit inside my glass tower and feel nothing and be touched by nothing, and yet exert my power, my will, through the glass walls of my ego'. That, roughly, is the condition of a man who accepts the condition of true egoism, and emptiness, in himself. He has a certain pride in the condition, since in pure emptiness of real feeling he can still carry out his ambition, his will to egoistic success. Now I doubt if a woman can feel like this. The most egoistic woman is always in a tangle of hate, if not of love. But the true male egoist neither hates nor loves. He is quite empty, at the middle of him. Only on the surface he has feelings: and these he is always trying to get away from. Inwardly, he feels nothing. And when he feels nothing, he exults in his ego and knows he is safe. Safe, within his fortifications, inside his glass tower. But I doubt if women can even understand this condition in a man. They mistake emptiness for depth. They think the false calm of the egoist who really feels nothing is strength. And they imagine that all the defenses which the confirmed egoist throws up, the glass tower of imperviousness, are screens to a real man, a positive being. And they throw themselves madly on the defences, to tear them down and come at the real man, little knowing that there is no real man, the defences are only there to protect a hollow emptiness, an egoism, not a human man.

Every man who is acutely alive is acutely wrestling his own soul.

She could just distinguish his features, as he slept the perfect sleep. In this darkness, she seemed to see him so distinctly. But he was far off, in another world. Ah, she could shriek with torment, he was so far off, and perfected, in another world. She seemed to look at him as at a pebble far away under clear dark water. And here was she, left with all the anguish of consciousness, whilst he was sunk deep into the other element of mindless, remote, living shadow-gleam. He was beautiful, far-off, and perfected. They would never be together. Ah, this awful, inhuman distance which would always be interposed between her and the other being! There was nothing to do but to lie still and endure. She felt an overwhelming tenderness for him, and a dark, under-stirring of jealous hatred, that he should lie so perfect and immune, in an other-world, whilst she was tormented with violent wakefulness, cast out in the outer darkness.

Her eyes were like the first morning of the world, so ageless

Quiero un amor que sea como un sueño, como dormir, como nacer de nuevo, vulnerable como un niño en el instante de llegar al mundo".

If you admit a unison, you forfeit all the possibilities of chaos...Love is a direction which excludes all other directions. It is a freedom together, if you like.

Try to love me a little more, and want me a little less.

Better a thousand times take one's chance with death, than accept a life one did not want.

Had you noticed them before?" he asked. "No, never before," she replied. "And now you will always see them," he said.

Birkin came with Hermione. She had a rapt, triumphant look, like the fallen angels restored, yet still subtly demoniacal, now she held Birkin by the arm. And he was expressionless, neutralised, possessed by her as if it were his fate, without question.

He would behave in the same way, say the same things, give himself completely to anybody who came along, anybody and everybody who liked to appeal to him. It was despicable, a very insidious form of prostitution.

personal

Sabemos hacer cosas pero no sabemos vivir. Es curioso ese rasgo familiar".

If there is no love, what is there?" she cried, almost jeering. "There is," he said, in a voice of pure abstraction, "a final me which is stark and impersonal and beyond responsibility. So there is a final you. And it is there I would want to meet you-not in the emotional loving plane-but there beyond, where there is no speech and no terms of agreement. There we are two stark, unknown beings, two utterly strange creatures, I would want to approach you, and you me. And there could be no obligation, because there is no standard for action there, because no understanding has been reaped from that plane. It is quite inhuman-so there can be no calling to book, in any form whatsoever-because one is outside the pale of all that is accepted, and nothing known applies. On can only follow the impulse, taking that which lies in front, and responsible for nothing, asked for nothing, giving nothing, only each taking according to the primal desire.

It was such peace and heavenly freedom, just to fold her and kiss her gently, and not to have any thoughts or any desires or any will, just to be still with her, to be perfectly still and together, in a peace that was not sleep, but content in bliss. To be content in bliss, without desire or insistence anywhere, this was heaven: to be together in happy stillness.

She drops her art if anything else catches her. Her contrariness prevents her taking it seriously - she must never be serious, she feels she might give herself away. And she won't give herself away - she's always on the defensive. That's what I can't stand about her type.

Humanity is a huge aggregate lie, and a huge lie is less than a small truth. Humanity is less, far less than the individual because the individual may sometimes be capable of truth, and humanity is a tree of lies. And they say that love is greatest thing, they persist in saying this, the foul liars, and just look at what they do (...It's a lie to say that love is greatest, what people want is hate - hate, and nothing but hate. And in the name of righteousness and love they get it...If we want hate, let us have it - death, murder, torture, violent destruction- let us have it: but not in the name of love.

special natures you must give a special world.

Of course he had been loving Gerald all along, and all along denying it.

Strut' said Ursula. 'One wants to strut, to be a swan among geese

His suave loins of darkness, dark-clad and suave

I want to find you, where you don't know your own existence, the you that your common self denies utterly.

Her absorption was strange, almost rhapsodic. Both Birkin and Ursula were suspended. The little red pistillate flowers had some strange, almost mystic-passionate attraction for her.

A dozen or more boats on the lake swung their rosy and moon–like lanterns low on the water, that reflected as from a fire. In the distance, the steamer twanged and thrummed and washed with her faintly–splashing paddles, trailing her strings of coloured lights, and occasionally lighting up the whole scene luridly with an effusion of fireworks, Roman candles and sheafs of stars and other simple effects, illuminating the surface of the water, and showing the boats creeping round, low down. Then the lovely darkness fell again, the lanterns and the little threaded lights glimmered softly, there was a muffled knocking of oars and a waving of music. Gudrun paddled almost imperceptibly. Gerald could see, not far ahead, the rich blue and the rose globes of Ursula’s lanterns swaying softly cheek to cheek as Birkin rowed, and iridescent, evanescent gleams chasing in the wake. He was aware, too, of his own delicately coloured lights casting their softness behind him.

And however one might sentimentalise it, this sex business was one of the most ancient, sordid connections and subjections. Poets who glorified it were mostly men. Women had always known there was something better, something higher. And now they knew it more definitely than ever. The beautiful pure freedom of a woman was infinitely more wonderful than any sexual love. The only unfortunate thing was that men lagged so far behind women in the matter. They insisted on the sex thing like dogs. And a woman had to yield. A man was like a child with his appetites. A woman had to yield him what he wanted, or like a child he would probably turn nasty and flounce away and spoil what was a very pleasant connection. But a woman could yield to a man without yielding her inner, free self. That the poets and talkers about sex did not seem to have taken sufficiently into account. A woman could take a man without really giving herself away. Certainly she could take him without giving herself into his power. Rather she could use this sex thing to have power over him. For she only had to hold herself back in sexual intercourse, and let him finish and expend himself without herself coming to the crisis: and then she could prolong the connection and achieve her orgasm and her crisis while he was merely her tool.

Yet the heart of each burned from the other. They burned with each other, inwardly. This they would never admit. They intended to keep their relationship a casual free-and-easy friendship, they were not going to be so unmanly and unnatural as to allow any heart-burning between them. They had not the faintest belief in deep relationship between men and men, and their disbelief prevented any development of their powerful but suppressed friendliness.

This was very bitter to Gerald, who had never known what boredom was, who had gone from activity to activity, never at a loss. Now, gradually, everything seemed to be stopping in him. He did not want any more to do the things that offered. Something dead within him just refused to respond to any suggestion. He cast over in his mind, what it would be possible to do, to save himself from this misery of nothingness, relieve the stress of this hollowness. And there were only three things left, that would rouse him, make him live. One was to drink or smoke hashish, the other was to be soothed by Birkin, and the third was women. And there was no-one for the moment to drink with. Nor was there a woman. And he knew Birkin was out. So there was nothing to do but to bear the stress of his own emptiness.

There was something northern about him that magnetised her.

In sleep, you dream, in drink you curse, and in travel you yell at a porter. No, work and love are the two. When you're not at work you should be in love.' 'Be

You’ve got very badly to want to get rid of the old, before anything new will appear — even in the self.

She could hear a distant coughing of a sheep.

Put the lights out, we shall see better.

The most normal people have the worst subterranean selves.

Yet he was tense, feeling that he and the elderly, estranged woman were conferring together like traitors, like enemies within the camp of the other people.

There was a glimmer of nightly rabbits across the ground.

Unthinkable clothing

love

It seethes and seethes, a river of darkness, putting forth lilies and snakes

To die is to move on with the invisible. To die is also a joy, a joy of submitting to that which is greater than the known, namely, the pure unknown. That is a joy. But to live mechanized and cut off within the motion of the will, to live as an entity absolved from the unknown, that is shameful and ignominious. There is no ignominy in death. There is complete ignominy in an unreplenished, mechanized life. Life indeed may be ignominious, shameful to the soul. But death is never a shame. Death itself, like the illimitable space, is beyond our sullying.

Because you want to have everything in your own volition, your deliberate voluntary consciousness. You want it all in that loathsome little skull of yours, that ought to be cracked like a nut. For you'll be the same till it is cracked, like an insect in its skin. If one cracked your skull perhaps one might get a spontaneous, passionate woman out of you, with real sensuality. As it is, what you want is pornography--looking at yourself in mirrors, watching your naked animal actions in mirrors, so that you can have it all in your consciousness, make it all mental.

I really do not want to be forced into all this criticism and analysis of life. I really do want to see things in their entirety, with their beauty left to them, and their wholeness, their natural holiness.Don't you feel it, don't you feel you can't be tortured into any more knowledge?

¿A qué se debe que todas las mujeres piensan que la finalidad de su vida es tener un maridito y una casita gris en el oeste? ¿Qué clase de finalidad es ésa? ¿Por qué ha de ser ésa la finalidad de la vida?

Well,' he said, 'I don't know. What's the use of my generalizing? I only know my own case. I like women, but I don't desire them. I like talking to them; but talking to them, though it makes me intimate in one direction, sets me poles apart from them as far as kissing is concerned. So there you are! But don't take me as a general example, probably I'm just a special case: one of the men who like women, but don't love women, and even hate them if they force me into a pretence of love, or an entangled appearance.

And with trembling, excited hands she put the coveted stockings under Ursula's pillow. 'One gets the greatest joy of all out of really lovely stockings,' said Ursula. 'One does,' replied Gudrun; 'the greatest joy of all.

Those are the little seed-producing flowers, and the long catkins, they only produce pollen, to fertilise them.’ ‘Do they, do they!’ repeated Hermione, looking closely. ‘From those little red bits, the nuts come; if they receive pollen from the long danglers.

Really! But weren't you fearfully tempted?' 'In the abstract but not in the concrete,' said Ursula. 'When it comes to the point, one isn't even tempted—oh, if I were tempted, I'd marry like a shot. I'm only tempted NOT to.' The faces of both sisters suddenly lit up with amusement.

You must mark in these things obviously. It’s the fact you want to emphasise, not the subjective impression to record. What’s the fact?—red little spiky stigmas of the female flower, dangling yellow male catkin, yellow pollen flying from one to the other. Make a pictorial record of the fact, as

Only moderately ordinary children should be sent to school--so it seems to me.' 'I'm inclined to think just the opposite. I think it would probably make her more normal if she went away and mixed with other children.' 'She wouldn't mix, you see. You never really mixed, did you? And she wouldn't be willing even to pretend to. She's proud, and solitary, and naturally apart. If she has a single nature, why do you want to make her gregarious?' 'No, I don't want to make her anything. But I think school would be good for her.' 'Was it good for you?' Gerald's eyes narrowed uglily. School had been torture to him. Yet he had not questioned whether one should go through this torture.

There is only one tree, there is only one fruit, in your mouth.

Ay," she said, in an incomprehensible monosyllable, that sounded profoundly cynical.

I'd just come to the conclusion that nothing in the world mattered except somebody to take the edge off one's being alone.

But man will never be gone," she said, with insidious, diabolical knowledge of the horrors of persistence. "The world will go with him.

They all began to guess.

don't you REALLY WANT to get married?

You don't think one needs the EXPERIENCE of having been married?' she asked. 'Do you think it need BE an experience?' replied Ursula.

remote, virgin look of modern girls, sisters

But both had the remote, virgin look of modern girls, sisters of Artemis rather than of Hebe.

The great chasm of memory from her childhood in the intimate country surroundings of Cossethay and the Marsh Farm—she remembered the servant Tilly, who used to give her bread and butter sprinkled with brown sugar, in the old living-room where the grandfather clock had two pink roses in a basket painted above the figures on the face—and now when she was travelling into the unknown with Birkin, an utter stranger—was so great, that it seemed she had no identity, that the child she had been, playing in Cossethay churchyard, was a little creature of history, not really herself.

Starting with the hypothesis that all the characters in Women in Love suffer from acute dissociation of sensibility, it becomes clear that psychological reintegration is no longer possible for them, and complete divorce between reason and emotion, mind and body, is imminent. As a result, the characters become mental or physical in basic nature and are symbolically presented accordingly.

The beautiful pure freedom of a woman was infinitely more wonderful than any sexual love. The only fortunate thing was that men lagged so far behind women in the matter. They insisted on the sex thing like dogs.

It was obvious in them too that love had gone through them: that is, the physical experience. It is curious what a subtle but unmistakable transmutation it makes, both in the body of men and women: the woman more blooming, more subtly rounded, her young angularities softened, and her expression either anxious or triumphant: the man much quieter, more inward, the very shapes of his shoulders and his buttocks less assertive, more hesitant.

You know, love isn't the twin-soul business. With you, for instance, women are like apples on a tree. You can have one that you can reach. Those that look best are overhead, but it's no good bothering with them. So you stretch up, perhaps you pull down a bough and just get your fingers round a good one. Then it swings back and you feel wild and you say your heart's broken. But there are plenty of apples as good for you no higher than your chest.

It did seem as if Hermione, like the moon, had only one side to her penny. There was no obverse. She stared out all the time on the narrow, but to her, complete world of the extant consciousness. In the darkness, she did not exist.

I believe in being warm-hearted. I believe especially in being warm-hearted in love, in fucking with a warm heart. I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the women take it warm-heartedly, everything would come all right.

She was tortured with desire to see him again, a nostalgia, a necessity to see him again, to make sure it was not all a mistake, that she was not deluding herself, that she really felt this strange and overwhelming sensation on his account, this knowledge of him in her essence, this powerful apprehension of him. ‘Am I really singled out for him in some way, is there really some pale gold, arctic light that envelopes only us two?’ she asked herself. And she could not believe it, she remained in a muse, scarcely conscious of what was going on around.

Tomorrow was Monday. Monday, the beginning of another school-week! Another shameful, barren school-week, mere routine and mechanical activity. Was not the adventure of death infinitely preferable? Was not death infinitely more lovely and noble than such a life? A life of barren routine, without inner meaning, without any real significance. How sordid life was, how it was a terrible shame to the soul, to live now! How much cleaner and more dignified to be dead! One could not bear any more of this shame of sordid routine and mechanical nullity. One might come to fruit in death.

Isn’t the mind,’ she said, with the convulsed movement of her body, ‘isn’t it our death? Doesn’t it destroy all our spontaneity, all our instincts? Are not the young people growing up today, really dead before they have a chance to live?’ ‘Not because they have too much mind, but too little,’ he said brutally.

Make it. Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world down to fit yourself. As a matter of fact, two exceptional people make another world. You and I, we make another, separate world. You don’t want a world same as your brothers-in-law. It’s just the special quality you value. Do you want to be normal or ordinary? It’s a lie. You want to be free and extraordinary, in an extraordinary world of liberty.” Gerald looked at Birkin with subtle eyes of knowledge. But he would never openly admit what he felt. He knew more than Birkin, in one direction—much more. And this gave him his gentle love for the other man, as if Birkin were in some way young, innocent, childlike: so amazingly clever, but incurably innocent.

A freak!” exclaimed Gerald, startled. And his face opened suddenly, as if lighted with simplicity, as when a flower opens out of the cunning bud. “No—I never consider you a freak.” And he watched the other man with strange eyes, that Birkin could not understand. “I feel,” Gerald continued, “that there is always an element of uncertainty about you—perhaps you are uncertain about yourself. But I’m never sure of you. You can go away and change as easily as if you had no soul.

As for the future, that they never mentioned except one laughed out some mocking dream of the destruction of the world by a ridiculous catastrophe of man’s invention: a man invented such a perfect explosive that it blew the earth in two, and the two halves set off in different directions through space, to the dismay of the inhabitants: or else the people of the world divided into two halves, and each half decided it was perfect and right, the other half was wrong and must be destroyed; so another end of the world.

She was grieved, and bitterly sorry for the man who was hurt so much. But still, in her heart of hearts, where the love should have burned, there was a blank. Now, when all her women's pity was roused to its full extent, when she would have slaved herself to death to nurse him and to save him, when she would have taken the pain herself, if she could, somewhere far away inside her, she felt indifferent to him and his suffering. It hurt her most of all, this failure to love him, even when he roused her strong emotions.

You think, don’t you,” she said slowly, “that I only want physical things? It isn’t true. I want you to serve my spirit.” “I know you do. I know you don’t want physical things by themselves. But, I want you to give me—to give your spirit to me—that golden light which is you—which you don’t know—give it me—” After a moment’s silence she replied: “But how can I, you don’t love me! You only want your own ends. You don’t want to serve me, and yet you want me to serve you. It is so one-sided!” It was a great effort to him to maintain this conversation, and to press for the thing he wanted from her, the surrender of her spirit. “It is different,” he said. “The two kinds of service are so different. I serve you in another way—not through yourself,—somewhere else. But I want us to be together without bothering about ourselves—to be really together because we are together, as if it were a phenomenon, not a thing we have to maintain by our own effort.” “No,” she said, pondering. “You are just egocentric. You never have any enthusiasm, you never come out with any spark towards me. You want yourself, really, and your own affairs. And you want me just to be there, to serve you.

You think we ought to break up this life, just start and let fly?” he asked. “This life. Yes, I do. We’ve got to bust it completely, or shrivel inside it, as in a tight skin. For it won’t expand any more.” There was a queer little smile in Gerald’s eyes, a look of amusement, calm and curious. “And how do you propose to begin? I suppose you mean, reform the whole order of society?” he asked. Birkin had a slight, tense frown between the brows. He too was impatient of the conversation. “I don’t propose at all,” he replied. “When we really want to go for something better, we shall smash the old.

From the bottom of her heart, from the bottom of her soul, she despised and detested people, adult people. She loved only children and animals: children she loved passionately, but coldly. They made her want to hug them, to protect them, to give them life. But this very love, based on pity and despair, was only a bondage and a pain to her. She loved best of all the animals, that were single and unsocial as she herself was. She loved the horses and cows in the field. Each was single and to itself, magical. It was not referred away to some detestable social principle. It was incapable of soulfulness and tragedy, which she detested so profoundly. She could be very pleasant and flattering, almost subservient, to people she met. But no one was taken in. Instinctively each felt her contemptuous mockery of the human being in himself, or herself. She had a profound grudge against the human being. That which the word 'human' stood for was despicable and repugnant to her. Mostly her heart was closed in this hidden, unconscious strain of contemptuous ridicule. She thought she loved, she thought she was full of love. This was her idea of herself.

William was only one year old, and his mother was proud of him, he was so pretty... He was a joy to her, the twining wisps of hair clustering round his head. Mrs Morel lay listening, one Sunday morning, to the chatter of the two. Then she dozed off. When she came downstairs... seated in his armchair, against the chimney piece, sat Morel, rather timid: and standing between his legs, the child - cropped like a sheep, with such an odd round poll - looking wondering at her: and on a newspaper spread out upon the hearth rug, a myriad of crescent-shaped curls, like the petals of a marigold scattered in the reddening firelight. Mrs Morel stood still. It was her first baby. She went very white, and was unable to speak. "What dost think on 'im?" Morel laughed uneasily. She gripped her two fists, lifted them, and came forward. Morel shrank back... Her lip trembled, her face broke, and, snatching up the child, she buried her face in his shoulder and cried painfully. She was one of those women who cannot cry: whom it hurts as it hurts a man. It was like the ripping something out of her, her sobbing... She went about her work with closed mouth and very quiet... She spoke to him civilly, and never alluded to what he had done. But he felt something final had happened. ...But she knew, and Morel knew, that that act had caused something momentous to take place in her soul. She remembered that scene all her life, as one in which she had suffered the most intensely. This act of masculine clumsiness was a spear through the side of her love for Morel.

I don’t like to think too much about you, in my head, that only makes a mess of us both. But of course what I live for now is for you and me to live together. I’m frightened, really...I feel my inside turn to water sometimes, and there you are, going to have a child by me. But never mind. All the bad times that ever have been, haven’t been able to blow the crocus out: not even the love of women. So they won’t be able to blow out my wanting you, nor the little glow there is between you and me. We’ll be together next year. And though I’m frightened, I believe in your being with me. A man has to fend and fettle for the best, and then trust in something beyond himself. You can’t insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it. So I believe in the little flame between us. For me now, it’s the only thing in the world. I’ve got no friends, not inward friends. Only you. And now the little flame is all I care about in my life.. It’s my Pentecost, the forked flame between me and you... Me and God is a bit uppish, somehow. But the little forked flame between me and you: there you are! That’s what I abide by, and will abide by... “That’s why I don’t like to start thinking about you actually. It only tortures me, and does you no good. I don’t want you to be away from me. But if I start fretting it wastes something. Patience, always patience. This is my fortieth winter. And I can’t help all the winters that have been. But this winter I’ll stick to my little pentecost flame, and have some peace. And I won’t let the breath of people blow it out. I believe in a higher mystery, that doesn’t let even the crocus be blown out. And if you’re in Scotland and I’m in the Midlands, and I can’t put my arms round you, and wrap my legs round you, yet I’ve got something of you. My soul softly flaps in the little pentecost flame with you, like the peace of fucking. We fucked a flame into being. Even the flowers are fucked into being between the sun and the earth. But it’s a delicate thing, and takes patience and the long pause. “So I love chastity now, because it is the peace that comes of fucking. I love being chaste now. I love it as snowdrops love the snow. I love this chastity, which is the pause of peace of our fucking, between us now like a snowdrop of forked white fire. And when the real spring comes, when the drawing together comes, then we can fuck the little flame brilliant and yellow, brilliant. But not now, not yet! Now is the time to be chaste, it is so good to be chaste, like a river of cool water in my soul. I love the chastity now that it flows between us. It is like fresh water and rain. How can men want wearisomely to philander! What a misery to be like Don Juan, and impotent ever to fuck oneself into peace, and the little flame alight, impotent and unable to be chaste in the cool between-whiles, as by a river. “Well, so many words, because I can’t touch you. If I could sleep with my arms round you, the ink could stay in the bottle. We could be chaste together just as we can fuck together. But we have to be separate for a while, and I suppose it is really the wiser way. If only one were sure. “Never mind, never mind, we won’t get worked up. We really trust in the little flame, in the unnamed god that shields it from being blown out. There’s so much of you here with me, really, that it’s a pity you aren’t all here. “Never mind about Sir Clifford. If you don’t hear anything from him, never mind. He can’t really do anything to you. Wait, he will want to get rid of you at last, to cast you out. And if he doesn’t, we’ll manage to keep clear of him. But he will. In the end he will want to spew you out as the abominable thing. “Now I can’t even leave off writing to you. “But a great deal of us is together, and we can but abide by it, and steer our courses to meet soon. John Thomas says good night to lady Jane, a little droopingly, but with a hopeful heart.