D. H. Lawrence

“ There the famous idealists and transcendentalists of America met to till the soil and hew the timber in the sweat of their own brows, thinking high thoughts the while, and breathing an atmosphere of communal love, and tingling in tune with the Oversoul, like so many strings of a super-celestial harp. ”

“ It is all just materialistic, and a good deal is, and always will be, charlatanry.
Because the real human soul, the Holy Ghost, has its own deep prescience, which will not be put into figures, but flows on dark, a stream of prescience. ”

“ A trance means that all her individual personal intelligence goes to sleep, like a hen with her head under her wing. But the apparatus of consciousness remains working. Without a soul in it.
And what can this apparatus of consciousness do, when it works? Why, surely something. A wireless apparatus goes tick-tick-tick, taking down messages. So does your human apparatus. All kinds of messages. Only the soul, or the under-consciousness, deals with these messages in the dark, in the under-conscious. ”

“ There is never much worth in these 'messages', because they are never more than fragmentary items of dead, disintegrated consciousness. And the medium has, and always will have, a hopeless job, trying to disentangle the muddle of mess- ages. ”

“ And the real human soul is too proud, and too sincere in its belief in the Holy Ghost that is within, to stoop to the practices of these spiritualist and other psychic tricks of material vibrations.
Because the first part of reverence is the acceptance of the fact that the Holy Ghost will never materialize: will never be anything but a ghost. ”

“ There may even be vibrations of ghosts in the air. Ghosts being dead wills, mind you, not dead souls. The soul has nothing to do with these dodges.
But some unit of force may persist for a time, after the death of an individual - some associations of vibrations may linger like little clouds in the etheric atmosphere after the death of a human being, or an animal. And these little clots of vibration may transfer themselves to the conscious-apparatus of the medium. ”

“ If the Divine Father doesn't bring on the flogging, in this life, then Sinful Man shiveringly awaits his whipping in the afterlife.
Bah, the Divine Father, like so many other Crowned Heads, has abdicated his authority. Man can sin as much as he likes. ”

“ All, perhaps, except the I, Nathaniel. He is still a sad, integral consciousness.
But not excepting Zenobia. The Black Pearl is rotting down. Fast. The cleverer she is, the faster she rots.
And they are all disintegrating, so they take to psychic tricks. It is a certain sign of the disintegration of the psyche in a man, and much more so in a woman, when she takes to spiritualism, and table-rapping, and occult messages, or witch-craft and supernatural powers of that sort. When men want to be supernatural, be sure that something has gone wrong in their natural stuff. More so, even, with a woman. ”

“ And in so far as the realm of cause-and-effect is master of the living soul, in so far as events are mechanically maturing, the forecast may be true.
But the living souls of men may upset the mechanical march of events at any moment. ”

“ For instance, the sin in Hester and Arthur Dimmesdale's case was a sin because they did what they thought? it wrong to do. If they had really wanted to be lovers, and if they had had the honest courage of their own passion, there would have been no sin, even had the desire been only momentary. ”

“ The new generation is having no ghosts or cobwebs. It is setting up in the photography line, and is just going to make a sound financial thing out of it. For this purpose all old hates and old glooms, that belong to the antique order of Haughty Fathers, all these are swept up in the vacuum cleaner, and the vendetta-born young couple effect a perfect understanding under the black cloth of a camera and prosperity. Vivat Industria!
Oh, Nathaniel, you savage ironist! ”

“ Man should never do the thing he believes to be wrong. Because if he does, he loses his own singleness, wholeness, natural honour.
If you want to do a thing, you've either got to believe, sincerely, that its your true nature to do this thing - or else you've got to let it alone. ”

“ It was this very doing of the thing that they themselves believed to be wrong, that constituted the chief harm of the act. Man invents sin, in order to enjoy the feeling of being naughty. Also, in order to shift the responsibility for his own acts. A Divine Father tells him what to do. And man is naughty and doesn't obey. ”

“ And all the music they made was the music of their quarrelling.
You can't idealize hard work. Which is why America invents so many machines and contrivances of all sort: so that they need do no physical work. ”

“ Vibrations from the stars, vibrations from unknown magnetos, vibrations from unknown people, unknown passions. The human apparatus receives them all and they are all dealt with in the under-conscious. ”

“ Never did I feel such a fool, would have been more to the point.
Farcical fools, trying to idealize labour. You'll never succeed in idealizing hard work. Before you can dig mother earth you've got to take off your ideal jacket. ”

“ Nathaniel was more aware of Zenobia's voluptuousness than of her 'mind'.
3. Hollingsworth: a black-bearded blacksmith with a deep-voiced lust for saving criminals. Wants to build a great Home for these unfortunates.
4. Priscilla: a sort of White Lily, a clinging little mediumistic tempstress who has been made use of in public seances. A sort of prostitute soul.
5. Zenobia's Husband: an unpleasant decayed person with magnetic powers and teeth full of gold - or set in gold. It is he who has given public spiritualist demonstrations, with Priscilla for the medium. ”