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
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
The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Flowers
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
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: Explanation, Service, Living, Achievement
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
It is so much more difficult to live with one’s body than with one’s soul. One’s body is so much more exacting: what it won’t have it won’t have, and nothing can make bitter into sweet.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Body, Mankind, Man
Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let live, love and let love, flower and fade, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Love
Can you understand how cruelly I feel the lack of friends who will believe in me a bit?
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Friendship
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
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
We ought to dance with rapture that we might be alive… and part of the living, incarnate cosmos.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Dancing
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: Living, Tragedy
They were evidently small men, all wind and quibbles, flinging out their chuffy grain to us with far less interest than a farm-wife feels as she scatters corn to her fowls.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Education, Colleges, Universities
I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Writers, Writing, Authors & Writing
Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Pornography
Those who go searching for love only make manifest their own lovelessness.
—D. H. Lawrence
Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Freedom, Home
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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: Instincts, Reason, Intuition
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: Names, Identity
We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Authority, Generations
Take nothing, to say: I have it! For you can possess nothing, not even peace.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Peace
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: Tourism, Travel
I cannot cure myself of that most woeful of youth’s follies—thinking that those who care about us will care for the things that mean much to us.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Taste, Style, Thinking
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
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
We make a mistake forsaking England and moving out into the periphery of life. After all, Taormina, Ceylon, Africa, America—as far as we go, they are only the negation of what we ourselves stand for and are: and we’re rather like Jonahs running away from the place we belong.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Exile
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
God how I hate new countries: They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like senility than anything.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Nations, Nationalism, Nation, Nationality
The great home of the soul is the open road.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Courage
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
You must drop all your democracy. You must not believe in “the people.” One class is no better than another. It must be a case of Wisdom, or Truth. Let the working classes be working classes. That is the truth. There must be an aristocracy of people who have wisdom, and there must be a Ruler: a Kaiser: no Presidents and democracies.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Democracy
We need not feel ashamed of flirting with the zodiac. The zodiac is well worth flirting with.
—D. H. Lawrence
There’s always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Morality, Morals
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