Aging & Wisdom Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence doesn’t frame separation as defeat; he frames it as hygiene. The line has the bracing bluntness of someone who thinks modern intimacy has gone rancid, not romantic. “Stay apart” isn’t a sulk, it’s a prescription: distance as a way to drain the toxins of resentment, competition, and sexual bargaining that accumulate when men and women are forced into constant proximity under bad terms. The kicker is “again.” He’s implying there was once a baseline of tenderness - a capacity for generosity between the sexes - that industrial life, social scripts, and emotional illiteracy have corroded.

The subtext is classic Lawrence: he distrusts the polite, over-verbalized relationship that performs equality while quietly waging war. He’s writing in a period when gender roles were both rigid and in upheaval: post-Victorian morality cracking, women pressing for political and sexual autonomy, men recalibrating power they assumed was natural. Lawrence’s work often treats that churn not as liberation-by-default but as a crisis of touch, desire, and respect. “Hearts grow gentle” is doing a lot of work: it suggests that tenderness is not a feeling you discover; it’s a muscle you re-train after it’s been hardened by daily grievances.

What makes the sentence land is its moral audacity. It refuses the modern belief that constant communication fixes everything. Lawrence bets on silence, absence, and recalibration - a cooling-off period for the soul - so that connection can return as choice rather than obligation, as curiosity rather than control.