Top 100 Quotes About D H Lawrence
#1. Isn't it remarkable how everyone who knew [D.H.] Lawrence has felt compelled to write about him? Why, he's had more books written about him than any writer since Byron!
Aldous Huxley
#2. D. H. Lawrence used to observe on our national character: "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted." Women
Piper Kerman
#3. D. H. Lawrence's "Never trust the teller. Trust the tale" is always right.
Greil Marcus
#4. There are more men lurking in sheds in my garden than in any D.H. Lawrence novel.
Trisha Ashley
#5. I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence.
Seamus Heaney
#6. I can still remember the afternoon, on my 15th birthday, when I opened up 'The Virgin and the Gypsy,' D.H. Lawrence's novella, in my tiny cell in boarding school, and whole worlds of possibility opened out that I had never guessed existed. The language was on fire and sang of liberation.
Pico Iyer
#7. I have a romantic conception of the writer's life, and the sort of writer's life that I admire is probably a childless life, possibly a marriageless life, certainly a travelling life - I'm in awe of how much D.H. Lawrence managed to get around. But that's never been something I'm capable of doing.
Rachel Cusk
#8. On the strength of his literary output alone ... any woman of sense would decline to tackle D.H. Lawrence at 1,000 pounds a night.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#9. What was left was sex in the head, as D.H.Lawrence called it. ... Where else would the human subject have sex but in the head? Sexual desire was a play of signifiers, an infinite determent and displacement of anticipated pleasure which the brute coupling of the signifieds temporarily interrupted.
David Lodge
#11. She didn't like weepy films. She liked to
quote D. H. Lawrence : "Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself
of feelings you haven't really got." Hers were grim European films
- Antonioni, Bertolucci, Bergman - films where everybody
died or wished they had.
Janet Fitch
#12. People who read D.H. Lawrence suspect that the forbidden is not necessarily without its virtue, and so are easily persuaded that the forbidden and the virtuous are one and the same.
Kevin Brockmeier
#13. Sex and love are inseparable, like life and consciousness. - D. H. LAWRENCE
David Givens
#14. If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing.
Shelby Foote
#15. For [D.H.] Lawrence, existence was one continuous convalescence; it was as though he were newly reborn from a mortal illness every day of his life. What these convalescent eyes saw, his most casual speech would reveal.
Aldous Huxley
#16. It's kinda like D.H. Lawrence had this idea of two people meeting on a road, and instead of just passing and glancing away, they decide to accept what he calls the confrontation between their souls. It's like freeing the brave, reckless gods within us all.
Richard Linklater
#17. Her lungs felt thick and slow, her mind dissolved, she felt she could cling like a bat in the long swoon of the crannied, underword darkness. Cling like a bat and sway for ever swooning in the draughts of the darkness
D.H. Lawrence
#18. There's nothing wrong with sexual feelings in themselves, so long as they are straightforward and not sneaking or sly. The right sort of sex stimulus is invaluable to human daily life. Without it the world grows grey.
D.H. Lawrence
#19. When love enters, the whole spiritual constitution of a man changes, is filled with the Holy Ghost, and almost his form is altered.
D.H. Lawrence
#20. Sometimes a high moon, liquid-brilliant, scudded across a hollow space and took cover under electric, brown-iridescent cloud-edges.
D.H. Lawrence
#21. Now man cannot live without some vision of himself. But still less can he live with a vision that is not true to his inner experience and inner feeling.
D.H. Lawrence
#23. And she shrank away again, back into her darkness, and for a long while remained blotted safely away from living.
D.H. Lawrence
#24. Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves.
D.H. Lawrence
#25. There is an eternal vital correspondence between our blood and the sun: there is an eternal vital correspondence between our nerves and the moon. If we get out of contact and harmony with the sun and moon, then both turn into great dragons of destruction against us.
D.H. Lawrence
#26. I want to be gone out of myself, and you to be lost to yourself, so we are found different.
D.H. Lawrence
#27. I know the greatness of Christianity; it is a past greatness.. I live in 1924, and the Christian venture is done.
D.H. Lawrence
#28. The search for happiness ... always ends in the ghastly sense of the bottomless nothingness into which you will inevitably fall if you strain any further.
D.H. Lawrence
#29. The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.
D.H. Lawrence
#30. We have buried so much of the delicate magic of life.
D.H. Lawrence
#31. Their words were only accidents in the mutual silence.
D.H. Lawrence
#32. But the act, called the sexual act, is not for the depositing of seed. It is for leaping off into the unknown, as from a cliff's edge, like Sappho into the sea.
D.H. Lawrence
#33. Gods should be iridescent, like the rainbow in the storm. Man creates a God in his own image, and the gods grow old along with the men that made them ... But the god-stuff roars eternally, like the sea, with too vast a sound to be heard.
D.H. Lawrence
#34. So slowly the hot elephant hearts
grow full of desire,
and the great beasts mate in secret at last,
hiding their fire.
D.H. Lawrence
#35. Along the avenue of cypresses,
All in their scarlet cloaks and surplices
Of linen, go the chanting choristers,
The priests in gold and black, the villagers ...
D.H. Lawrence
#37. Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a third thing, that makes it water and nobody knows what that is.
D.H. Lawrence
#38. And can a man his own quietus make
with a bare bodkin?
D.H. Lawrence
#39. I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.
D.H. Lawrence
#40. Having achieved and accomplished love ... man ... has become himself, his tale is told.
D.H. Lawrence
#41. The purest lesson our era has taught is that man, at his highest, is an individual, single, isolate, alone, in direct soul-communication with the unknown God, which prompts within him.
D.H. Lawrence
#42. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance ...
D.H. Lawrence
#43. Couldn't one go right away, to the far ends of the earth, and be free from it all?
One could not. The far ends of the earth are not five minutes from Charing Cross. nowadays. While the wireless is active, there are no far ends of the earth.
D.H. Lawrence
#44. Tragedy looks to me like man in love with his own defeat.
Which is only a sloppy way of being in love with yourself.
D.H. Lawrence
#45. He's got _go_, anyhow.'
Certainly, he's got go,' said Gudrun. 'In fact I've never seen a man that showed signs of so much. The unfortunate thing is, where does his _go_ go to, what becomes of it?
D.H. Lawrence
#46. The proper way to eat a fig, in society,
Is to split it in four, holding it by the stump,
And open it, so that it is a glittering, rosy, moist, honied, heavy-petalled four-petalled flower.
D.H. Lawrence
#47. We must know, if only in order to learn not to know. The supreme lesson of human consciousness is to learn how not to know. That is, how not to interfere.
D.H. Lawrence
#48. Like a great bog humanity swamped her, and she sank in, weak at the knees, filled with repulsion and fear of every person she met.
D.H. Lawrence
#49. She was walking along the bottom-most bed
she was quite safe: quite safe, if she had to go on and on for ever, seeing this was the very bottom, and there was nothing deeper. There was nothing deeper, you see, so one could not but feel certain, passive.
D.H. Lawrence
#50. I cannot get any sense of an enemy - only of a disaster.
D.H. Lawrence
#51. I have realized that my will, no matter how intelligent I am, is only another nuisance on the face of the earth, once I start exerting it. And other people's wills are even worse.
D.H. Lawrence
#52. The near touch of death may be a release into life; if only it will break the egoistic will, and release that other flow.
D.H. Lawrence
#53. Shall I tell you what you have that other men don't? ... It's the courage of your own tenderness.
D.H. Lawrence
#54. Sunday night meant, in the dark, wintry, rainy Midlands ... anywhere where two creatures might stand and squeeze together and spoon ... Spooning was a fine art, whereas kissing and cuddling are calf-processes.
D.H. Lawrence
#55. It seethes and seethes, a river of darkness, putting forth lilies and snakes
D.H. Lawrence
#56. I only want one thing of men, and that is, that they should leave me alone.
D.H. Lawrence
#57. There's so much of you here with me, really, it's a pity you aren't all here.
D.H. Lawrence
#58. It is not woman who claims the highest in man. It is a man's own religious soul that drives him on beyond women, to his supreme activity. For his highest, man is responsible to God alone.
D.H. Lawrence
#59. Mankind has got to get back to the rhythm of the cosmos.
D.H. Lawrence
#60. or less in bits. Constance, his wife, was then twenty-three years old,
D.H. Lawrence
#62. Love is never a fulfillment. Life is never a thing of continuous bliss. There is no paradise. Fight and laugh and feel bitter and feel bliss: and fight again. Fight, fight. That is life.
D.H. Lawrence
#63. And all the time she felt the reflection of his hopelessness in her. She couldn't quite, quite love in hoplessness. And he, being hopeless, couldn't ever love at all.
D.H. Lawrence
#64. For my part, life is so many things I don't care what it is. It's not my affair to sum it up. Just now it's a cup of tea. This morning it was wormwood and gall. Hand me the sugar.
D.H. Lawrence
#65. There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.
D.H. Lawrence
#67. When one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere.
D.H. Lawrence
#68. A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.
D.H. Lawrence
#69. Reach me a gentian, give me a torch! Let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of a flower down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark.
D.H. Lawrence
#70. She thought she loved, she thought she was full of love.
D.H. Lawrence
#71. Can you understand how cruelly I feel the lack of friends who will believe in me a bit?
D.H. Lawrence
#72. An artist is only an ordinary man with a greater potentiality.
D.H. Lawrence
#74. Who knows the power that Saturn has over us, or Venus? But it is a vital power, rippling exquisitely through us all the time.
D.H. Lawrence
#75. Oh, the joy-hogs! Oh 'enjoying oneself'! Another modern form of sickness.
D.H. Lawrence
#76. O the stale old dogs who pretend to guard
the morals of the masses,
how smelly they make the great back-yard
wetting after everyone that passes.
D.H. Lawrence
#77. And that is how we are. By strength of will we cut off our inner intuitive knowledge from admitted consciousness. This causes a state of dread, or apprehension, which makes the blow ten times worse when it does fall.
D.H. Lawrence
#78. Shame, what was it? It was part of extreme delight. It was that part of delight of which man is usually afraid. Why afraid? The secret, shameful things are most terribly beautiful.
D.H. Lawrence
#79. People always make war when they say they love peace.
D.H. Lawrence
#80. What we want is to destroy our false, inorganic connections, especially those related to money, and re-establish the living organic connections, with the cosmos, the sun and earth, with mankind and nation and family. Start with the sun, and the rest will slowly, slowly happen.
D.H. Lawrence
#81. Whales in mid-ocean, suspended in the waves of the sea great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies. And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their whale-tender young and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of the beginning and the end.
D.H. Lawrence
#82. Of course , if I am nothing but an ego, and woman is nothing but another ego, then there is really no vital difference between us. Two little dolls of conscious entities, squeaking when you squeeze them. And with a tiny bit of an extraneous appendage to mark which is which ...
D.H. Lawrence
#83. The true self is not aware that it is a self. A bird, as it sings, sings itself. But not according to a picture. It has no idea of itself.
D.H. Lawrence
#84. Cause-and-effect will not explain even the individuality of a single dandelion.
D.H. Lawrence
#85. Men and women aren't really dogs: they only look like it and behave like it. Somewhere inside there is a great chagrin and a gnawing discontent.
D.H. Lawrence
#86. The central law of all organic life is that each organism is intrinsically isolate and single in itself. The moment its isolation breaks down, and there comes an actual mixing and confusion, death sets in.
D.H. Lawrence
#87. Their whole life depends on spending money, and now they've
got none to spend. That's our civilization and our education: bring up
the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money
gives out.
D.H. Lawrence
#88. Things men have made with wakened hands, and put soft life into
are awake through years with transferred touch, and go on glowing
for long years.
And for this reason, some old things are lovely
warm still with the life of forgotten men who made them.
D.H. Lawrence
#89. I never knew how soothing trees are-many trees and patches of open sunlight, and tree presences; it is almost like having another being.
D.H. Lawrence
#90. I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. It's amazing how it cheers one up to shred orange and scrub the floor.
D.H. Lawrence
#91. Consciousness is an end in itself. We torture ourselves getting somewhere, and when we get there it is nowhere, for there is nowhere to get to.
D.H. Lawrence
#92. If it doesn't absorb you, if it isn't any fun, don't do it.
D.H. Lawrence
#93. Aaron Sisson was the last man on the little black railway-line
D.H. Lawrence
#94. All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets,unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing.
D.H. Lawrence
#95. Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe. The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass.
D.H. Lawrence
#96. (...) he was beginning to be himself. And now he wanted madly to be free to go on. A home, his work, and absolute freedom to move and to be, in her, with her, this was his passionate desire. He thought in a kind of ecstasy, living an hour of painful intensity.
D.H. Lawrence
#97. The great mass of humanity should never learn to read or write.
D.H. Lawrence
#98. Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven't really got.
D.H. Lawrence
#99. Isn't it god's own image? tramping his thirty miles a day
after partridges, or a little rubber ball?
wouldn't you like to be like that, well off, and quite the thing?
D.H. Lawrence
#100. Men don't think, high and low-alike, they take what a woman does for them for granted.
D.H. Lawrence
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