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
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 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
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: Travel, Tourism
Try to find your deepest issue in every confusion, and abide by that.
—D. H. Lawrence
Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art—or almost the only stuff.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Vulgarity, Swearing, Profanity
One realm we have never conquered: the pure present.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: The Present
Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a third thing, that makes water and nobody knows what that is.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Water
We ought to dance with rapture that we might be alive… and part of the living, incarnate cosmos.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Dancing
It is all a question of sensitiveness. Brute force and overbearing may make a terrific effect. But in the end, that which lives by delicate sensitiveness. If it were a question of brute force, not a single human baby would survive for a fortnight. It is the grass of the field, most frail of all things, that supports all life all the time. But for the green grass, no empire would rise, no man would eat bread: for grain is grass; and Hercules or Napoleon or Henry Ford would alike be denied existence.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Kindness
The great virtue in life is real courage that knows how to face facts and live beyond them.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Courage
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 hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writing, Writers
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
Topics: Self-Pity, Hedonism
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
The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Conscience, Thought
We need not feel ashamed of flirting with the zodiac. The zodiac is well worth flirting with.
—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
We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Authority, Generations
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
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, Men & Women, Women
Can you understand how cruelly I feel the lack of friends who will believe in me a bit?
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Friendship
The one woman who never gives herself is your free woman, who is always giving herself.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Women
The upshot was, my paintings must burn that English artists might finally learn.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Censorship
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
The living moment is everything.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Live-now, Past and Present
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
Ah, then, upon my bedroom I do draw
The blind to hide the garden, where the moon
Enjoys the open blossoms as they straw
Their beauty for his taking, boon for boon.
And I do lift my aching arms to you,
And I do lift my anguished, avid breast,
And I do weep for very pain of you,
And fling myself at the doors of sleep, for rest.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Love
What you intuitively desire, that is possible to you.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Instincts
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: Hard Work, Work
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