"Twilight in Italy"

D. H. Lawrence actually opens his book in Germany.

• If only nations would realize that they have certain natural characteristics, if only they could understand and agree to each other's particular nature, how much simpler it would all be.
• Perhaps it belongs to the forgotten, imperial processions.
• So rare and unearthly the light is, from the mountains, full of strange radiance. Then every now and again recurs the crucifix, at the turning of an open, grassy road, holding a shadow and a mystery under its pointed hood.
• Where they are everything is set back, as in a clear frosty air. Their beauty is almost this, this strange, clean-cut isolation.
• the eternal, negative radiance of the snows
• All being and all passing away is part of the issue, which is eternal and changeless.
• 'To be, or not to be,' this may be the question, but is it not a question for death to answer.
• small like the kernel of the truth
• He is consciously trying to convey a feeling, he is no longer striving awkwardly to render a truth, a religious fact.
• ... the same neutral triumph of death, complete, negative death, so complete as to be abstract, beyond cynicism in its completeness of leaving off.
• I saw it often, and yet for a long time it never occurred to me that it actually existed. It was like a vision, a thing one does not expect to come close to.