Quotes by Lawrence, D. H.

"The source of all life and knowledge is in man and woman, and the source of all living is in the interchange and the meeting and mingling of these two: man-life and woman-life, man-knowledge and woman-knowledge, man-being and woman-being."

Lawrence, D. H. on women   

"The moon is a white strange world, great, white, soft-seeming globe in the night sky, and what she actually communicates to me across space I shall never fully know. But the moon that pulls the tides, and the moon that controls the menstrual periods of women, and the moon that touches the lunatics, she is not the mere dead lump of the astronomist. When we describe the moon as dead, we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void, we are describing our own unbearable emptiness."

Lawrence, D. H. on moon
6 fans of this quote   

"There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street."

Lawrence, D. H. on morality   

"I can't do with mountains at close quarters -- they are always in the way, and they are so stupid, never moving and never doing anything but obtrude themselves."

Lawrence, D. H. on mountains   

"Museums, museums, museums, object-lessons rigged out to illustrate the unsound theories of archaeologists, crazy attempts to co-ordinate and get into a fixed order that which has no fixed order and will not be co-coordinated! It is sickening! Why must all experience be systematized? A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch."

Lawrence, D. H. on museums and galleries   

"Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description."

Lawrence, D. H. on myth   

"I don't like your miserable lonely single front name. It is so limited, so meager; it has no versatility; it is weighted down with the sense of responsibility; it is worn threadbare with much use; it is as bad as having only one jacket and one hat; it is like having only one relation, one blood relation, in the world. Never set a child afloat on the flat sea of life with only one sail to catch the wind."

Lawrence, D. H. on names   

"God how I hate new countries: They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like senility than anything."

Lawrence, D. H. on nations   

"Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art -- or almost the only stuff."

Lawrence, D. H. on obscenity   

"I love Italian opera -- it's so reckless. Damn Wagner, and his bellowings at Fate and death. Damn Debussy, and his averted face. I like the Italians who run all on impulse, and don't care about their immortal souls, and don't worry about the ultimate."

Lawrence, D. H. on opera   

"One can no longer live with people: it is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease."

Lawrence, D. H. on people   

"We need not feel ashamed of flirting with the zodiac. The zodiac is well worth flirting with."

Lawrence, D. H. on astrology   

"Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it."

Lawrence, D. H. on pornography   

"If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of a harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule."

Lawrence, D. H. on prostitution   

"We have lost the art of living; and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life, the science of behavior, we are complete ignoramuses. We have psychology instead."

Lawrence, D. H. on psychology   

"Always this same morbid interest in other people and their doings, their privacies, their dirty linen, always this air of alertness for personal happenings, personalities, personalities, personalities. Always this subtle criticism and appraisal of other people, this analysis of other people's motives. If anatomy presupposes a corpse, then psychology presupposes a world of corpses. Personalities, which means personal criticism and analysis, presuppose a whole world laboratory of human psyches waiting to be vivisected. If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink, at last, as human psychology."

Lawrence, D. H. on psychology   

"Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer."

Lawrence, D. H. on reason   

"I want relations which are not purely personal, based on purely personal qualities; but relations based upon some unanimous accord in truth or belief, and a harmony of purpose, rather than of personality. I am weary of personality. Let us be easy and impersonal, not forever fingering over our own souls, and the souls of our acquaintances, but trying to create a new life, a new common life, a new complete tree of life from the roots that are within us."

Lawrence, D. H. on relationship   

"A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification."

Lawrence, D. H. on religion   

"I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps."

Lawrence, D. H. on respectability   

"And what's romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything As You Like It, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose and it's always daisy-time."

Lawrence, D. H. on romance and romanticism   

"It is all a question of sensitiveness. Brute force and overbearing may make a terrific effect. But in the end, that which lives by delicate sensitiveness. If it were a question of brute force, not a single human baby would survive for a fortnight. It is the grass of the field, most frail of all things, that supports all life all the time. But for the green grass, no empire would rise, no man would eat bread: for grain is grass; and Hercules or Napoleon or Henry Ford would alike be denied existence."

Lawrence, D. H. on sensitivity   

"I am sure no other civilization, not even the Romans, has showed such a vast proportion of ignominious and degraded nudity, and ugly, squalid dirty sex. Because no other civilization has driven sex into the underworld, and nudity to the W.C."

Lawrence, D. H. on sex   

"And if tonight my soul may find her peace in sleep, and sink in good oblivion, and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created."

Lawrence, D. H. on sleep
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"Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot."

Lawrence, D. H. on speech
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"It is so much more difficult to live with one's body than with one's soul. One's body is so much more exacting: what it won't have it won't have, and nothing can make bitter into sweet."

Lawrence, D. H. on body   

"After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else."

Lawrence, D. H. on books - reading   

"One sheds one's sicknesses in books -- repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them."

Lawrence, D. H. on books - reading   

"I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd."

Lawrence, D. H. on books - reading   

"The upshot was, my paintings must burn that English artists might finally learn."

Lawrence, D. H. on censorship   

"I cannot cure myself of that most woeful of youth's follies -- thinking that those who care about us will care for the things that mean much to us."

Lawrence, D. H. on taste   

"Tragedy is like strong acid -- it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth."

Lawrence, D. H. on tragedies   

"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically."

Lawrence, D. H. on tragedies   

"Behold then Septimus Dodge returning to Dodge-town victorious. Not crowned with laurel, it is true, but wreathed in lists of things he has seen and sucked dry. Seen and sucked dry, you know: Venus de Milo, the Rhine or the Coliseum: swallowed like so many clams, and left the shells."

Lawrence, D. H. on travel   

"Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither."

Lawrence, D. H. on travel   

"The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters -- not to talk in armies and nations and numbers -- but to track it home."

Lawrence, D. H. on war   

"The one woman who never gives herself is your free woman, who is always giving herself."

Lawrence, D. H. on women   

"The chief thing about a woman -- who is much of a woman -- is that in the long run she is not to be had... She is not to be caught by any of the catch-words, love, beauty, honor, duty, worth, work, salvation -- none of them -- not in the long run. In the long run she only says Am I satisfied, or is there some beastly dissatisfaction gnawing and gnawing inside me. And if there is some dissatisfaction, it is physical, at least as much as psychic, sex as much as soul."

Lawrence, D. H. on women   

"You'll never succeed in idealizing hard work. Before you can dig mother earth you've got to take off your ideal jacket. The harder a man works, at brute labor, the thinner becomes his idealism, the darker his mind."

Lawrence, D. H. on work   

"I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment."

Lawrence, D. H. on writers and writing