Sure, several literary works have controversies attached to them. J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series are just examples of notable literary works whose reputation are preceded by the controversies they have stirred. In the mid-20th century, another work stirred quite the controversy for its strong and bold language. D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover‘s was once the center of a legal battle because of its bold language. It would go on to win the case. However, Lady Chatterley’s Lover is also brimming with memorable lines which I have rounded up. Here are some of the interesting quotes from this book.

Do check out my complete review of this controversial literary work by clicking here.

“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 habitats, 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.”

~ D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

“It’s just an amusing idea that sex is just another form of talk, where you act the words instead of saying them. I suppose it’s quite true. I suppose we might exchange as many sensations and emotions with women as we do ideas about the weather and so on. Sex might be a sort of normal physical conversation between a man and a woman.”

~ D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

“Was it just that? She was to be content to weave a steady life with him, all one fabric, but perhaps brocaded with the occasional flower of an adventure .But how could she know what she would feel next year How could one ever know 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 butterflies.”

~ D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

“But that is how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don’t have them they hate you because you won’t; and when you do have them they hate you again, for some other reason. Or for no reason at all, except that they are discontented children, and can’t be satisfied whatever they get, let a woman do what she may.”

~ D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

“Yes, I do believe in something. I believe 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.”

~ D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

“She did not understand the beauty he found in her, through touch upon her living secret body, almost the ecstasy of beauty. For passion alone is awake to it. And when passion is dead, or absent, then the magnificent throb of beauty is incomprehensible and even a little despicable; war, live beauty of contact, so much deeper than the beauty of vision.”

~ D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

“But, especially in love, only counterfeit emotions exist nowadays. We have all been taught to mistrust everybody emotionally, from parents downwards, or upwards. Don’t trust anybody with you real emotions: if you’ve got any: that is the slogan of today. Trust them with your money, even, but never your feelings. They are bound to trample on them.”

~ D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

“And dimly she realised one of the great laws of the human soul: that when the emotional soul receives a wounding shock, which does not kill the body, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is only appearance. It is really only the mechanism of the resumed habit. Slowly, slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like a bruise, which only slowly deepens its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche. And when we think we have recovered and forgotten, it is then that the terrible after-effects have to be encountered at their worst.”

~ D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

“From the old wood came an ancient melancholy, somehow soothing to her, better than the harsh insentience of the outer world. She liked the inwardness of the remnant of forest, the unspeaking reticence of the old trees. They seemed a very power of silence, and yet a vital presence. They, too, were waiting: obstinately, stoically waiting, and giving off a potency of silence.”

~ D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

“It was as of thousands and thousands of little roots and threads of consciousness in him and her had thrown together into a tangled mass, till they could crowd no more, and the plant was dying. Now quietly, subtly, she was unravelling the tangle of his consciousness and hers, breaking the threads gently, one by one, with patience and impatience to get clear.”

~ D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

“The wood was silent, still and secret in the evening drizzle of rain, full of the mystery of eggs and half-open buds, half unsheathed flowers. In the dimness of it all trees glistened naked and dark as if they had unclothed themselves, and the green things on earth seemed to hum with greenness.”

~ D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

“It’s no good trying to get rid of your aloneness. You’ve got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they’ve got to come. You can’t force them.”

~ D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
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