We need not feel ashamed of flirting with the zodiac. The zodiac is well worth flirting with.
—D. H. Lawrence
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
I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writing, Writers
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
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
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.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Relationships
The great virtue in life is real courage that knows how to face facts and live beyond them.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Courage
But the effort, the effort! And as the marrow is eaten out of a man’s bones and the soul out of his belly, contending with the strange rapacity of savage life, the lower stage of creation, he cannot make the effort any more.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Effort
The world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can’t wake up.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Humankind, Humanity
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.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Sleep
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.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Identity, Names
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.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Nature, Mountains
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.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Living, Service, Explanation, Achievement
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.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Opera
Only at his maximum does an individual surpass all his derivative elements, and become purely himself. And most people never get there. In his own pure individuality a man surpasses his father and mother, and is utterly unknown to them.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Individuality
I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Letters
We only seem to learn from Life that Life doesn’t matter so much as it seemed to do—it’s not so burningly important, after all, what happens. We crawl, like blinking sea-creatures, out of the Ocean onto a spur of rock, we creep over the promontory bewildered and dazzled and hurting ourselves, then we drop in the ocean on the other side: and the little transit doesn’t matter so much.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Life and Living
My God, these folks don’t know how to love—that’s why they love so easily.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Lovers, Love
Men always do leave off really thinking, when the last bit of wild animal dies in them.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Thinking
Sleep is still most perfect 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
Topics: Sleep
The great living experience for every man is his adventure into the woman. The man embraces in the woman all that is not himself, and from that one resultant, from that embrace, comes every new action.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Men & Women, Men, Women
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.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Men & Women, Nature, Women, Men
We ought to dance with rapture that we might be alive… and part of the living, incarnate cosmos.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Dancing
America is neither free nor brave, but a land of tight, iron-clanking little wills, everybody trying to put it over everybody else, and a land of men absolutely devoid of the real courage of trust, trust in life’s sacred spontaneity. They can’t trust life until they can control it.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: America
The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Men, Women, Men & Women
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
Never trust the teller, trust the tale.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Gossip
I shall always be a priest of love.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Love
This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Evil
I believe a man is born first unto himself—for the happy developing of himself, while the world is a nursery, and the pretty things are to be snatched for, and pleasant things tasted; some people seem to exist thus right to the end. But most are born again on entering manhood; then they are born to humanity, to a consciousness of all the laughing, and the never-ceasing murmur of pain and sorrow that comes from the terrible multitudes of brothers.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Maturity
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- E. M. Forster English Novelist
- Virginia Woolf English Novelist
- Jeanette Winterson English Novelist
- Pamela Hansford Johnson English Novelist
- 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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