D. H. Lawrence (1885–30) was an English author of provocative novels that attracted controversy for their sexual content. He was also a successful poet, playwright, and short-story writer.
Lawrence is best known for inciting strong reactions in his readers for his radical narrative of familial and marital lives and his brazen celebration of sexual relations. For these reasons, he waged a constant battle with the censors.
Lawrence’s most famous novels are Sons and Lovers (1913,) The Rainbow (1915,) Women in Love (1920,) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928.) The latter is the most influential and notorious of Lawrence’s novels. It features a young aristocrat whose husband is paralyzed from the waist down and impotent. He encourages her to find a lover but disapproves of her choice of his gamekeeper.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover was banned from publication for more than 30 years because of its obscene themes and language. In 1960, a famous court case cleared the book of obscenity after 35 prominent writers and literary critics testified in its favor. When Penguin Books published 200,000 copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the book sold out within a day, and most bookstores that carried the book ran out of copies within 15 minutes.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by D. H. Lawrence
Every man has a mob self and an individual self, in varying proportions.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Self-Discovery
One sheds one’s sicknesses in books—repeats and presents again one’s emotions, to be master of them.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Reading, Books
One realm we have never conquered: the pure present.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: The Present
Design in art is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can’t invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Design
Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Animals
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
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
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.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Work, Hard Work
My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Intelligence
The great virtue in life is real courage that knows how to face facts and live beyond them.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Courage
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
Topics: Love
Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Ethics
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
Topics: Speech, Conversation, Enthusiasm
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
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 cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Men, Women, Men & Women
Men always do leave off really thinking, when the last bit of wild animal dies in them.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Thinking
Can you understand how cruelly I feel the lack of friends who will believe in me a bit?
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Friendship
I shall always be a priest of love.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Love
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
Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Art, Critics, Criticism
The living moment is everything.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Past and Present
The world is wonderful and beautiful and good beyond one’s wildest imagination. Never, never, never could one conceive what love is, beforehand, never. Life can be great—quite god-like. It can be so. God be thanked I have proved it.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Love
While we live, let us live.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Time Management
Tragedy is like strong acid—it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Tragedy
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
Topics: Intuition
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