D H Lawrence Quotes

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

Naught is possessed, neither gold, nor land nor love, nor life, nor peace, nor even sorrow nor death, nor yet salvation. Say of nothing: It is mine. Say only: It is with me. ~ D.H. Lawrence

The novel is the highest example of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered. ~ D.H. Lawrence

When we really want to go for something better, we shall smash the old. Until then, any sort of proposal, or making proposals, is no more than a tiresome game for self-important people. ~ D.H. Lawrence

I've never seen a wild thing feel sorry for itself. ~ D.H. Lawrence

They continued to mount the winding staircase. A high wind, blowing through the loopholes, went rushing up the shaft, and filled the girl's skirts like a balloon, so that she was ashamed, until he took the hem of her dress and held it down for her. He did it perfectly simply, as he would have picked up her glove. She remembered this always. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Till she seemed to swoon, gradually her mind went, and she passed away, everything in her was melted down and fluid, and she lay still, become contained by him, sleeping in him as lightning sleeps in a pure, soft stone. ~ D.H. Lawrence

They were mere permutations of known quantities. There was no roundness or fullness in this world he now inhabited, everything was a dead shape mental arrangement, without life or being. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Money is a sort of instinct. It's a sort of property of nature in a person to make money. It's nothing you do. It's no trick you play. It's a sort of permanent accident of your own nature; once you start, you make money, and you go on ... But you've got to begin ... You've got to get in. You can do nothing if you are kept outside. You've got to beat your way in. Once you've done that, you can't help it! ~ D.H. Lawrence

Men live in glad obedience to the masters they believe in, or they live in a frictional opposition to the master they wish to undermine. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Isn't it remarkable how everyone who knew [D.H.] Lawrence has felt compelled to write about him? Why, he's had more books written about him than any writer since Byron! ~ Aldous Huxley

We must know, if only in order to learn not to know. The supreme lesson of human consciousness is to learn how not to know. That is, how not to interfere. ~ D.H. Lawrence

The trees down the boulevard stand naked in thought,
Their abundant summery wordage silenced, caught
In the grim undertow; naked the trees confront
Implacable winter's long, cross-questioning brunt. ~ D.H. Lawrence

It's only when the ghastly mob-sleep, the dream helplessness of the mass psyche overcomes him, that he becomes completely base and obscene ~ D.H. Lawrence

The East is marvellously interesting for tracing our steps back. But for going forward, it is nothing. All it can hope for is to be fertilised by Europe, so that it can start on a new phase. ~ D.H. Lawrence

The journey of love has been rather a lacerating, if well-worth-it, journey. ~ D.H. Lawrence

She liked Anthony, though. All her life, at intervals, she returned to the thought of him and of that which he offered. But she was a traveller, she was a traveller on the face of the earth, and he was an isolated creature living in the fulfilment of his own senses. She ~ D.H. Lawrence

Special natures you must give a special world. ~ D.H. Lawrence

If I were the moon, I know where I would fall down. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Don't you think one lives for times like last night?' she said to him. 'Ay! But there's the rest o'times to think on,' he replied, rather short. They ~ D.H. Lawrence

That's just what a woman is. She thinks she knows what's good for a man, and she's going to see he gets it; and no matter if he's starving, he may sit and whistle for what he needs, while she's got him, and is giving him what's good for him. ~ D.H. Lawrence

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

No man is a man unless to his woman he is a pioneer. ~ D.H. Lawrence

(...) and a story meant money. (...) If you were young, you just set your teeth, and bit on and held on, till the money began to flow from the invisible; it was a question of power. It was a question of will; a subtle, subtle powerful emanation of will out of yourself brought back to you the mysterious nothingness of money: a word on a piece of paper. ~ D.H. Lawrence

My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness - what old and hard-worked staleness, masquerading as the all-new! ~ D.H. Lawrence

Most men have a deadness in them that frightens me so because of my own deadness. Why can't men get their life straight, like St.Mawr, and then think? Why can't they think quick, mother: quick as a woman: only farther than we do? ~ D.H. Lawrence

Unless one decorates one's house for oneself alone, best leave it bare, for other people are walleyed. ~ D.H. Lawrence

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

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch! Let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of a flower down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark. ~ D.H. Lawrence

The profoundest of all sensualities
is the sense of truth
and the next deepest sensual experience
is the sense of justice. ~ D.H. Lawrence

What man most passionately wants is his living wholeness and his living unison, not his own isolate salvation of his "soul." Man wants his physical fulfillment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul, as my spirit is part of my nation. In my own very self, I am part of my family. There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Is our day of creative life finished? Does there remain to us only the strange, awful afterwards of the knowledge in dissolution,the African knowledge, but different for us, who are blond and blue-eyed from the north? ... There was another way, the way of freedom. There was the paradisal entry into pure, single beingwhich accepted the obligation of the permanent connection with others, and with the other, submits to the yoke and leash of love, but never forfeits its own proud individual singleness, even while it loves and yields. ~ D.H. Lawrence

It is quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humor, creating him a reasonable being, yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture, and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Truth does not lie beyond humanity, but is one of the products of the human mind and feeling. ~ D.H. Lawrence

We don't exist unless we are deeply and sensually in touch with that which can be touched but not known. ~ D.H. Lawrence

That's the recoil of the same urge. The anarchist, the criminal, the murderer, he is only the extreme lover acting on the recoil. But it is love: only in recoil. It flies back, the love-urge, and becomes a horror. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Somewhere, deep down him, he was scared, he was born scared. And those who are born with fear are natural slaves, whose profund instint leads to dread, with poisonous fear, all of those who suddenly can possibly cut loose the slave colar around their necks. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spiraling round for terror, and holding each other in embrace, there in a darkness that outpassed them all, and left them tiny and daunted. So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core of nothingness, and yet not nothing. ~ D.H. Lawrence

A curious latency stirred in her consciousness that was not yet an idea. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Used to all kinds of society, she watched people as one reads the pages of a novel, with a certain disinterested amusement. ~ D.H. Lawrence

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

Wild Things in Captivity

Wild things in captivity
while they keep their own wild purity
won't breed, they mope, they die.

All men are in captivity,
active with captive activity,
and the best won't breed, though they don't know why.

The great cage of our domesticity
kills sex in a man, the simplicity
of desire is distorted and twisted awry.

And so, with bitter perversity,
gritting against the great adversity,
they young ones copulate, hate it, and want to cry.

Sex is a state of grace.
In a cage it can't take place.
Break the cage then, start in and try. ~ D.H. Lawrence

To Connie, everything in her world and life seemed worn out, and her dissatisfaction was older than the hills. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Man is a mistake. He must go. ~ D.H. Lawrence

And Venus among the fishes skips and is a she-dolphin
she is the gay, delighted porpoise sporting with love and the sea
she is the female tunny-fish, round and happy among the males
and dense with happy blood, dark rainbow bliss in the sea. ~ D.H. Lawrence

If we lose our sanity ... We can but howl the lugubrious howl of idiots, the howl of the utterly lost howling their nowhereness. ~ D.H. Lawrence

All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Oh build your ship of death, oh build it in time and build it lovingly, and put it between the hands of your soul. ~ D.H. Lawrence

The wisps of her crisp dark hair blew about her as she stooped, her eyes were big and wide and dark, when she looked up again, strange, startled, shy and sardonic at once. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Don't be sucked in by the su-superior, don't swallow the culture bait, don't drink, don't drink and get beerier and beerier, do learn to discriminate. ~ D.H. Lawrence

I only want one thing of men, and that is, that they should leave me alone. ~ D.H. Lawrence

But I will have it. I will love - it is my birthright. I will love the man I marry - that is all I care about. ~ D.H. Lawrence

For God's sake, all of you, say spiteful things about me, then I shall know I mean something to you. Don't say surgaries, or I'm done. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Sometimes a high moon, liquid-brilliant, scudded across a hollow space and took cover under electric, brown-iridescent cloud-edges. ~ D.H. Lawrence

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

Some things can't be ravished. You can't ravish a tin of sardines. And so many women are like that: and men. But the earth ... ! ~ D.H. Lawrence

When I want to move, I remember death, how it is ultimate and inevitable, and pure. Then I am free to move properly in life. It's like a man who wants to think, going and standing in front of a window. The space purifys ones' soul. And death is a window to me, with the darkness outside. And when I stand there, looking out, then the world and its active life seems only like a roomful of racket and light behind me, where I am taking part for a time, but not staying for long. It does not contain me and confine me. When I stand peacefully looking out on death, what is true in my soul disengages itself and is free and clear and untrammeled, I know what to do, I am sure, and free, and glad. Then I can turn into the world again"...

"When one stands in front of the darkness, and knows that one's own life will pass away there also, into the darkness...then, in the peace that accompanies this knowledge, one can declare simply that the existing world of man is base and wrong, and must go, we know that our lives contain the inception of a new earth.."

..."Remembering death, I know the life of the world as it is now is not living, it is a bad process of dying. And what we must live for is a new world of life. It doesn't matter when we die, so long as we live fulfilling the deepest desire that is in us. And a life which is a denial of the deepest desire is much worse than any death, it is a sheer lie."

"If one accepts death and knows that nothing can take u ~ D.H. Lawrence

Every true artist is the salvation of every other. Only artists produce for each other a world that is fit to live in. ~ D.H. Lawrence

I am a man and alive. For this reason I am a novelist. And, being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, te scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog ... Only in the novel are all things given full play. ~ D.H. Lawrence

I was looking at the sensoriums of heroes. I was sensing through the eyes and nose of Shelley and John Webster, and using the hearing and touch of Ginsberg and Duncan and Kerouac–– and the jazz lucidity of Creeley, and the Doug fir of Snyder, and the almost mystical, physical perceptions of D.H. Lawrence and of Olson himself. I was convinced that poetry was about, by, and from, the meat, that poetry was the product of flesh brushing itself against experience. We are seekers moving in the Tathagata brushing ourselves against the universe of the real, solid illusions. It is by our touches that we become ourselves –– as our ancestors became us and as we became our maturing, sharpening, brightening selves. ~ Michael McClure

He knew that conscience was chiefly fear of society: or fear of oneself. He was not afraid of himself. But he was quite consciously afraid of society, which he knew by instinct to be a malevolent, partly-insane beast. ~ D.H. Lawrence

There is nothing to save, now all is lost,
but a tiny core of stillness in the heart
like the eye of a violet. ~ D.H. Lawrence

These lines of D.H. Lawrence are taped to the wall of my office:

"What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.

No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them."

I under[stand] that failure is surely one of these strange angels. ~ Anne Lamott

The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread. ~ D.H. Lawrence

It is marriage, perhaps, which had given man the best of his freedom, given him his little kingdom of his own within the big kingdom of the state ... It is a true freedom because it is a true fulfilment, for man, woman and children. Do we then want to break marriage? If we do break it, it means we all fall to a far greater extent under the direct sway of the State. ~ D.H. Lawrence

But a democracy is bound in the end to be obscene, for it is composed of myriad disunited fragments, each fragment assuming to itself a false wholeness, a false individuality. Modern democracy is made up of millions of frictional parts all asserting their own wholeness. ~ D.H. Lawrence

everywhere for it. And, as she sought, the conviction came into her heart that her husband had taken it. What she had in her purse was all the money ~ D.H. Lawrence

I count it a mistake of our mistaken democracy, that every man who can read print is allowed to believe that he can read all that is printed. I count it a misfortune that serious books are exposed in the public market, like slaves exposed naked for sale. But there we are, since we live in an age of mistaken democracy, we must go through with it. ~ D.H. Lawrence

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

Men always do leave off really thinking, when the last bit of wild animal dies in them. ~ D.H. Lawrence

I thought I'd done with it all. Now I've begun again."
"Begun what?"
"Life."
"Life!" she re-echoed, with a queer thrill.
"It's life," he said. "There's no keeping clear. And if you do keep clear, you might almost as well die. So if I've got to be broken open again, I have
. ~ D.H. Lawrence

She, who was bored almost to agony, and who had nothing at all to do, she had not time to think even, seriously, of anything. Time being, after all, only the current of the soul in its flow. ~ D.H. Lawrence

if my memory serves me right, here is my genealogical line: Boccaccio, Petronius, Rabelais, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Maeterlinck, Romain Rolland, Plotinus, Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Dostoievsky (and other Russian writers of the Nineteenth Century), the ancient Greek dramatists, theElizabethan dramatists (excluding Shakespeare), Theodore Dreiser, Knut Hamsun, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Elie Faure, Oswald Spengler, Marcel Proust, Van Gogh, the Dadaists and Surrealists, Balzac, Lewis Carroll, Nijinsky, Rimbaud, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Giono, Celine, everything I read on Zen Buddhism, everything I read about China, India, Tibet, Arabia, Africa, and of course the Bible, the men who wrote it and especially the men who made the King James version, for it was the language of the Bible rather than its "message" which I got first and which I will never shake off. ~ Henry Miller

You must always be a-waggle with LOVE. ~ D.H. Lawrence

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

Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning it was not a Word, but a chirrup. ~ D.H. Lawrence

We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority. ~ D.H. Lawrence

I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd. ~ D.H. Lawrence

The only true aristocracy is that of consciousness. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Voltaire, Shelley, Wordsworth, Byron, Rousseau ... established a new connection between mankind and the universe, and the result was a vast release of energy. The sun was reborn to man and so was the moon. To man, the very sun goes stale, becomes a habit. Comes a saviour, a seer, and the very sun dances new in heaven. ~ D.H. Lawrence

A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Europe's the mayonnaise, but America supplies the good old lobster. ~ D.H. Lawrence

The human consistency and dignity one has been led to expect from one's fellow-men seem actually nonexistent ~ D.H. Lawrence

And Clifford the same. All that talk! All that writing! All that wild struggling to push himself forwards! It was just insanity. And it was getting worse, really maniacal.
Connie felt washed-out with fear. But at least, Clifford was shifting his grip from her on to Mrs Bolton. He did not know it. Like many insane people, his insanity might be measured by the things he was not aware of, the great desert tracts in his consciousness. ~ D.H. Lawrence

She herself had never been able to be altogether herself: it had been denied her. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Let a person only approach his or her own self with a deep respect, even reverence for all that the creative soul, the God-mystery within us, puts forth. Then we shall all be sound and free ... The creative spontaneous soul sends forth its promptings of desire and aspiration in us. These promptings are our true fate, which is our business to fulfill. A fate dictated from outside, from theory or from circumstance, is a false fate. ~ D.H. Lawrence

A new degree of anger came over him. What did it all matter? What did it matter if the mother talked Polish and cried in labour, if this child were stiff with resistance, and crying?Why take it to heart?Let the mother cry in labour, let the child cry in resistance, since they would do so. Why should he fight against it, why resist? Let it be, if it were so. Let them be as they were, if they insisted. ~ D.H. Lawrence

And however one might sentimentalise it, this sex business was one of the most ancient, sordid connections and subjections. Poets who glorified it were mostly men. Women had always known there was something better, something higher. And now they knew it more definitely than ever. The beautiful pure freedom of a woman was infinitely more wonderful than any sexual love. The only unfortunate thing was that men lagged so far behind women in the matter. They insisted on the sex thing like dogs.

And a woman had to yield. A man was like a child with his appetites. A woman had to yield him what he wanted, or like a child he would probably turn nasty and flounce away and spoil what was a very pleasant connection. But a woman could yield to a man without yielding her inner, free self. That the poets and talkers about sex did not seem to have taken sufficiently into account. A woman could take a man without really giving herself away. Certainly she could take him without giving herself into his power. Rather she could use this sex thing to have power over him. For she only had to hold herself back in sexual intercourse, and let him finish and expend himself without herself coming to the crisis: and then she could prolong the connection and achieve her orgasm and her crisis while he was merely her tool. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Don't be on the side of the angels, it's too lowering. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe. The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass. ~ D.H. Lawrence

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

She knew that the horse, born to serve nobly, had waited in vain for someone noble to serve. His spirit knew that nobility had gone out of men. ~ D.H. Lawrence

I would like [the working man] to give me back books and newspapers and theories. And I would like to give him back, in return, his old insouciance, and rich, original spontaneity and fullness of life. ~ D.H. Lawrence

I can give you a spirit love, I have given you this long, long time; but not embodied passion. See, you are a nun. I have given you what I would give a holy nun ... In all our relations no body enters. I do not talk to you through the senses - rather through the spirit. That is why we cannot love in the common sense. ~ D.H. Lawrence

And that is ... how they are. So terribly physically all over one another. They pour themselves one over the other like so much melted butter over parsnips. They catch each other under the chin, with a tender caress of the hand, and they smile with sunny melting tenderness into each other's face. ~ D.H. Lawrence

She looked at him, and oh, the weariness to her, of the
effort to understand another language, the weariness of hearing
him, attending to him, making out who he was, as he stood there
fair-bearded and alien, looking at her. She knew something of
him, of his eyes. But she could not grasp him. She closed her
eyes. ~ D.H. Lawrence

If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail. ~ D.H. Lawrence

They say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Away with all ideals. Let each individual act spontaneously from the forever incalculable prompting of the creative wellhead within him. There is no universal law. ~ D.H. Lawrence

How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species ~ D.H. Lawrence