How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
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 connextion. But a woman could yield to a man without yielding her inner, free self. (1.15)
Connie manages to have sex with her first boyfriend without losing some sort of "inner, free" part of herself. In other words, she has sex with him but it doesn't mean anything. It's just bodies.
Quote #2
It had a thrill of its own too: a queer vibrating thrill inside the body, a final spasm of self-assertion, like the last word, exciting, and very like the row of asterisks that can be put to show the end of a paragraph, and a break in the theme. (1.17)
Connie thinks about sex—orgasm, specifically—as though it's punctuation on a page of writing. Why have sex when you could just sit down at a typewriter? (We suspect that D. H. Lawrence spent a lot of time in front of typewriters.)
Quote #3
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: the man much quieter, more inward, the very shapes of his shoulders and his buttocks less assertive, more hesitant. (1.21)
Despite what your parents may have told you, it's unlikely that a double-blind, peer-reviewed study would find any visible difference between a virgin or a non-virgin. Not the kind that would make a guy look less confident, anyway.
Quote #4
"Lascivious! well, why not—? I can't see I do a woman any more harm by sleeping with her than by dancing with her...or even talking to her about the weather. It's just an interchange of sensations instead of ideas, so why not?" (4.22)
Clifford's friend Charles May claims that having sex with a woman is just like talking to her. Only with more bodily fluids and a greater risk of pregnancy.
Quote #5
"I don't over-eat myself and I don't over-f*** myself." (4.29)
Charles May makes this attitude sound reasonable. Sex and eating are both natural desires, and most people can control themselves. But May is one of Clifford's friends, so something must be wrong with his opinion.
Quote #6
"That thrust of the buttocks, surely it was a little ridiculous. If you were a woman, and a part in all the business, surely that thrusting of the man's buttocks was supremely ridiculous. Surely the man was intensely ridiculous in this posture and this act!" (10.201)
There's no denying that sex can look ridiculous if you're not doing it—they don't call it the beast with two backs for nothing.Connie hasn't quite given up her modern distaste for bodies, but Mellors is just about to change her mind on that.
Quote #7
"She'd just wait. If I kept back for half an hour, she'd keep back longer. And when I'd come and really finished, then she'd start on her own account, and I had to stop inside her till she brought herself off, wriggling and shouting, she'd clutch with herself down there, an' then she'd come off, fair in ecstasy." (14.100)
Here, Mellors is complaining that his wife, like 70% or so of women, never orgasmed from intercourse. It's totally her problem, though. Not his. Nope.
Quote #8
It cost her an effort to let him have his way and his will of her. She had to be a passive, consenting thing, like a slave, a physical slave. Yet the passion licked round her, consuming, and when the sensual flame of it pressed through her bowels and breast, she really thought she was dying: yet a poignant, marvellous death. (16.293)
The night before Connie leaves for Europe, she and Mellors have sex all night long. Boy, do they. They do all sorts of things that Lawrence won't even describe—or at least Mellors does them to Connie. Connie just lies there and thinks about England, while orgasms magically happen to her.
Quote #9
"It's the one insane taboo left: sex as a natural and vital thing. They won't have it, and they'll kill you before they'll let you have it." (17.86)
All Duncan Forbes wants to do is have sex, and they won't let him—whoever "they" is. Society? Culture? Men? Women? Probably all of the above.
Quote #10
"So I love chastity now, because it is the peace that comes of f***ing. 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 f***ing, between us now like a snowdrop of forked white fire."(19.169)
There's no denying that Lawrence can write a nice sentence, and this is a beauty. It also helps explain why Lady Chatterley's Lover isn't pornography, even though there are a lot of descriptions of sex. The point isn't the sex; it's the relationship between the man and woman.