Love Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence goes for the jugular by flipping the sentimental script: the problem isn’t a failure to love, it’s a ravenous need to be loved. The insult lands because it’s diagnostic, not decorative. “Eternal and abnormal craving” makes the desire feel less like romance and more like a symptom - compulsive, repetitive, almost clinical. He’s not describing a bad boyfriend; he’s sketching a personality organized around lack.

The blunt binary - “You aren’t positive, you’re negative” - is Lawrence at his most combative. “Positive” love, in his moral universe, is active, outward, risk-bearing: you give, you commit, you meet another person as a whole self. “Negative” is parasitic: you don’t connect, you consume. The verb choice is the tell. “Absorb, absorb” turns affection into suction, intimacy into extraction. Love becomes a resource to hoard, not a relationship to build.

The subtext is classically Lawrentian: modern life, with its social performance and spiritual anemia, breeds people who seek affirmation the way a machine seeks fuel. The kicker - “a shortage somewhere” - refuses to name the wound, because the wound isn’t the point. The point is the evasiveness: if you can keep chasing being adored, you never have to face what’s empty underneath, or do the harder work of becoming someone capable of giving.

Written in a culture newly obsessed with psychology and selfhood, the line reads like an early critique of what we’d now call validation addiction: the self that can’t love because it’s too busy trying to be filled.