Five passages from WOMEN IN LOVE that made me roll my eyes

I have been reading WOMEN IN LOVE since the end of September, one e-mail-sized chunk a weekday, and only now am I beginning to mildly enjoy it. There are a lot of reasons for this, among them that I used to like Lawrence a lot more and now I feel as if I'm reading the diary of a 14-year-old whenever I "see" into any of his characters' heads, which happens quite a lot since Lawrence is famous for breaking ground in that area. (On the other hand, maybe I'm just a robot incapable of reading or processing human emotions.)

I'm starting to make the turn because the novel is growing beyond its four primary characters, the sisters Brangwen, Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich. I wish a nasty accident would befall them, and luckily there is still time. The following five passages are all real and unaltered; for best results, picture them written in silver gel pen and large, bubbly handwriting on a diary page.

5. "She was palpitating and formless within the flux of the ghost life. She could not consider any more, what anybody would say of her or think about her. People had passed out of her range, she was absolved. She had fallen strange and dim, out of the sheath of the material life, as a berry falls from the only world it has ever known, down out of the sheath on to the real unknown."

4. (Hermione) "'Yes,' she said, as if she did not know what she were saying. 'Yes,' and she swallowed, and tried to regain her mind. But she could not, she was witless, decentralised. Use all her will as she might, she could not recover. She suffered the ghastliness of dissolution, broken and gone in a horrible corruption. And he stood and looked at her unmoved. She strayed out, pallid and preyed-upon like a ghost, like one attacked by the tomb-influences which dog us. And she was gone like a corpse, that has no presence, no connection."

3. "Gerald was excited by the desperate cleaving of Gudrun to Naomi. The essence of that female, subterranean recklessness and mockery penetrated his blood. He could not forget Gudrun's lifted, offered, cleaving, reckless, yet withal mocking weight. And Birkin, watching like a hermit crab from its hole, had seen the brilliant frustration and helplessness of Ursula. She was rich, full of dangerous power. She was like a strange unconscious bud of powerful womanhood. He was unconsciously drawn to her. She was his future."

2. "Then he clambered into the boat. Oh, and the beauty of the subjection of his loins, white and dimly luminous as be climbed over the side of the boat, made her want to die, to die. The beauty of his dim and luminous loins as be climbed into the boat, his back rounded and soft--ah, this was too much for her, too final a vision. She knew it, and it was fatal. The terrible hopelessness of fate, and of beauty, such beauty! He was not like a man to her, he was an incarnation, a great phase of life. She saw him press the water out of his face, and look at the bandage on his hand. And she knew it was all no good, and that she would never go beyond him, he was the final approximation of life to her."

1. "The daffodils were pretty, but who could see them?"

I'm pretty sure that last one is going to end up on a bumper sticker at Hot Topic someday.