I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Writers, Writing, Authors & Writing
The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Women, Men & Women, Men
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.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Religion
Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Animals
Try to find your deepest issue in every confusion, and abide by that.
—D. H. Lawrence
Every civilization when it loses its inner vision and its cleaner energy, falls into a new sort of sordidness, more vast and more stupendous than the old savage sort. An Augean stable of metallic filth.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Corruption, Civilization
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.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: People
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
Topics: Freedom
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.
—D. H. Lawrence
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.
—D. H. Lawrence
The one woman who never gives herself is your free woman, who is always giving herself.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Women
How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Men
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Tragedy, Living
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.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Travel, Tourism
I shall always be a priest of love.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Love
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.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Logic, Reason
One doesn’t know, till one is a bit at odds with the world, how much one’s friends who believe in one rather generously, mean to one.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Friendship
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
Topics: Boredom
Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Books, Literature
The more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Democracy
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
Topics: Tomorrow, The Future, Hedonism, Live-now, Self-Pity
You were a lord if you had a horse…
Far back, far back in our dark soul the horse prances… . The horse, the horse! The symbol of surging potency and power of movement, of action, in man.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Horses
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.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Art
One realm we have never conquered: the pure present.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: The Present
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.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: War
We don’t exist unless we are deeply and sensually in touch with that which can be touched but not known.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Existence
While we live, let us live.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Time Management, Value of a Day
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.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Reading, Books
I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Respect, Respectability
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.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Tourism, Travel
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- E. M. Forster English Novelist
- Virginia Woolf English Novelist
- Jeanette Winterson English Novelist
- Pamela Hansford Johnson British Novelist, Critic
- George Gissing English Novelist
- Margaret Drabble English Novelist
- J. G. Ballard English Novelist
- Jane Austen English Novelist
- J. B. Priestley British Novelist, Playwright, Essayist
- Dinah Craik English Novelist, Poet
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