D.H. Lawrence Quotes

Time went on grey, uncloured, like a long journey where she sat unconscious as the landscape unrolled beside her.
D.H. Lawrence
Never trust the teller. Trust the tale.
D.H. Lawrence
One realm we have never conquered: the pure present.
D.H. Lawrence
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 oranges and scrub the floor.
D.H. Lawrence
I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough Without ever having felt sorry for itself.
D.H. Lawrence
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 oranges or scrub the floor.
D.H. Lawrence
While we live let us live.
D.H. Lawrence
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
While we live let us live.
D.H. Lawrence
Never trust the teller. Trust the tale.
D.H. Lawrence
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
When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.
D.H. Lawrence
Life is ours to be spent not to be saved.
D.H. Lawrence
What you intuitively desire that is possible to you.
D.H. Lawrence
The mind can assert anything and pretend it has proved it. My beliefs I test on my body on my intuitional consciousness and when I get a response there then I accept.
D.H. Lawrence
It is our business to go as we are impelled.
D.H. Lawrence
Can you understand how cruelly I feel the lack of friends who will believe in me a bit?
D.H. Lawrence
Be still when you have nothing to say when genuine passion moves you say what you've got to say and say it hot.
D.H. Lawrence
The young Cambridge group the group that stood for "freedom" and flannel trousers and flannel shirts open at the neck and a well-bred sort of emotional anarchy and a whispering murmuring sort of voice and an ultra-sensitive sort of manner.
D.H. Lawrence
The great virtue in life is real courage that knows how to face facts and live beyond them.
D.H. Lawrence
In the ancient recipe the three antidotes for dullness or boredom are sleep drink and travel. It is rather feeble. From sleep you wake up from drink you become sober and from travel you come home again. And then where are you? No the two sovereign remedies for dullness are love or a crusade.
D.H. Lawrence
Love is. the flower of life and blossoms unexpectedly and without law and must be plucked where it is found and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.
D.H. Lawrence
Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar but his art if it be art will tell you the truth of his day. And that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. The truth lives from day to day and the marvelous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today.
D.H. Lawrence
I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself.
D.H. Lawrence
You have striven so hard and so long to compel life. Can't you now slowly change and let life slowly drift into you ... let the invisible life steal into you and slowly possess you.
D.H. Lawrence
The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble.
D.H. Lawrence
It was the talk that mattered supremely: the impassioned exchange of talk. Love was only a minor accompaniment.
D.H. Lawrence
She, who was bored almost to agony, and who had nothing at all to do, she had not time to think even, seriously, of anything. Time being, after all, only the current of the soul in its flow.
D.H. Lawrence
It's a curious thing that the mental life seems to flourish with its roots in spite, ineffable and fathomless spite. Always has been so! Look at Socrates, in Plato, and his bunch round him! The sheer spite of it all, just sheer joy in pulling somebody else to bits...Protagoras, or whoever it was! And Alcibiades, and all the other little disciple dogs joining in the fray! I must say it makes one prefer Buddha, quietly sitting under a bo-tree, or Jesus, telling his disciples little Sunday stories, peacefully, and without any mental fireworks. No, there's something wrong with the mental life, radically. It's rooted in spite and envy, envy and spite. Ye shall know the tree by its fruit.
D.H. Lawrence
The last year of her college career was wheeling slowly round. She could see ahead her examination and her departure. She had the ash of disillusion gritting under her teeth. Would the next move turn out the same? Always the shining doorway ahead; and then, upon approach, always the shining doorway was a gate into another ugly yard, dirty and active and dead. Always the crest of the hill gleaming ahead under heaven: and then, from the top of the hill only another sordid valley full of amorphous, squalid activity.
D.H. Lawrence
They stood together in a false intimacy, a nervous contact. And he was in love with her.
D.H. Lawrence
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
She lost her illusions in the collapse of her sympathies.
D.H. Lawrence
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
She turned, and saw a great white moon looking at her over the hill. And her breast opened to it, she was cleaved like a transparent jewel to its light. She stood filled with the full moon, offering herself. Her two breasts opened to make way for it, her body opened wide like a quivering anemone, a soft, dilated invitation touched by the moon.
D.H. Lawrence
Sometimes a high moon, liquid-brilliant, scudded across a hollow space and took cover under electric, brown-iridescent cloud-edges.
D.H. Lawrence
And Clifford the same. All that talk! All that writing! All that wild struggling to push himself forwards! It was just insanity. And it was getting worse, really maniacal.Connie felt washed-out with fear. But at least, Clifford was shifting his grip from her on to Mrs Bolton. He did not know it. Like many insane people, his insanity might be measured by the things he was not aware of, the great desert tracts in his consciousness.
D.H. Lawrence
Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste than Herman Melville.
D.H. Lawrence
Sleep seems to hammer out for me the logical conclusions of my vague days, and offer them to me as dreams.
D.H. Lawrence
Oh build your ship of death, oh build it in time and build it lovingly, and put it between the hands of your soul.
D.H. Lawrence
And yet - and yet - one's kite will rise on the wind as far as ever one has string to let it go. It tugs and tugs and will go, and one is glad the further it goes, even if everybody else is nasty about it.
D.H. Lawrence
When we really want to go for something better, we shall smash the old. Until then, any sort of proposal, or making proposals, is no more than a tiresome game for self-important people.
D.H. Lawrence
Why, oh why must one grow up, why must one inherit this heavy, numbing responsibility of living an undiscovered life? Out of the nothingness and the undifferentiated mass, to make something of herself! But what? In the obscurity and pathlessness to take a direction! But whither? How take even one step? And yet, how stand still? This was torment indeed, to inherit the responsibility of one’s own life.
D.H. Lawrence
Democracy in America was never the same as Liberty in Europe. In Europe Liberty was a great life-throb. But in America Democracy was always something anti-life. The greatest democrats, like Abraham Lincoln, had always a sacrificial, self-murdering note in their voices. American Democracy was a form of self-murder, always. Or of murdering somebody else... The love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.
D.H. Lawrence
But a democracy is bound in the end to be obscene, for it is composed of myriad disunited fragments, each fragment assuming to itself a false wholeness, a false individuality. Modern democracy is made up of millions of frictional parts all asserting their own wholeness.
D.H. Lawrence
Sleep is still most perfect, in spite of hygienists, when it is shared with a beloved. The warmth, the security and peace of soul, the utter comfort from the touch of the other, knits the sleep, so that it takes the body and soul completely in its healing.
D.H. Lawrence
She was always waiting, it seemed to be her forte.
D.H. Lawrence
He felt if he could not be alone, and if he could not be left alone, he would die.
D.H. Lawrence
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.
D.H. Lawrence
Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.
D.H. Lawrence
The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.
D.H. Lawrence
Only youth has a taste of immortality.
D.H. Lawrence
And they fear nothing, and they respect nothing, the young don't.
D.H. Lawrence
So, after three days of incessant brandy-drinking, he had burned out the youth from his blood, he had achieved this kindled state of oneness with all the world, which is the end of youth's most passionate desire.
D.H. Lawrence
For {she} had adopted the standard of the young: what there was in the moment was everything. And moments followed one another without necessarily belonging to one another.
D.H. Lawrence
I WANT her though, to take the same from me.She touches me as if I were herself, her own.She has not realized yet, that fearful thing, thatI am the other,she thinks we are all of one piece.It is painfully untrue.I want her to touch me at last, ah, on the root andquick of my darknessand perish on me, as I have perished on her.Then, we shall be two and distinct, we shall haveeach our separate being.And that will be pure existence, real liberty.Till then, we are confused, a mixture, unresolved,unextricated one from the other.It is in pure, unutterable resolvedness, distinctionof being, that one is free,not in mixing, merging, not in similarity.When she has put her hand on my secret, darkestsources, the darkest outgoings,when it has struck home to her, like a death, "this is _him!_"she has no part in it, no part whatever,it is the terrible _other_,when she knows the fearful _other flesh_, ah, dark-ness unfathomable and fearful, contiguous and concrete,when she is slain against me, and lies in a heaplike one outside the house,when she passes away as I have passed awaybeing pressed up against the _other_,then I shall be glad, I shall not be confused with her,I shall be cleared, distinct, single as if burnished in silver,having no adherence, no adhesion anywhere,one clear, burnished, isolated being, unique,and she also, pure, isolated, complete,two of us, unutterably distinguished, and in unutterable conjunction.Then we shall be free, freer than angels, ah, perfect.VIIIAFTER that, there will only remain that all mendetach themselves and become unique,that we are all detached, moving in freedom morethan the angels,conditioned only by our own pure single being,having no laws but the laws of our own being.Every human being will then be like a flower, untrammelled.Every movement will be direct.Only to be will be such delight, we cover our faceswhen we think of itlest our faces betray us to some untimely fiend.Every man himself, and therefore, a surpassingsingleness of mankind.The blazing tiger will spring upon the deer, un-dimmed,the hen will nestle over her chickens,we shall love, we shall hate,but it will be like music, sheer utterance,issuing straight out of the unknown,the lightning and the rainbow appearing in usunbidden, unchecked,like ambassadors.We shall not look before and after.We shall _be_, _now_.We shall know in full.We, the mystic NOW.(From the poem the Manifesto)
D.H. Lawrence
The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul, angry or gentle. Anger is just, and pity is just, but judgement is never just.
D.H. Lawrence
Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor teaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup.
D.H. Lawrence
I am turned into a dream. I feel nothing, or I don't know what I feel. Yet it seems to me I am happy.
D.H. Lawrence
He toasted his bacon on a fork and caught the drops of fat on his bread; then he put the rasher on his thick slice of bread, and cut off chunks with a clasp-knife, poured his tea into his saucer, and was happy.
D.H. Lawrence