D. H. LAWRENCE QUOTES II
English author (1885-1930)
The bitch-goddess, Success, was trailed by thousands of gasping dogs with lolling tongues.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Benjamin [Franklin], in his sagacity, knew that the breaking of the old world was a long process. In the depths of his own under-consciousness he hated England, he hated Europe, he hated the whole corpus of the European being. He wanted to be American. But you can't change your nature and mode of consciousness like changing your shoes. It is a gradual shedding. Years must go by, and centuries must elapse before you have finished. Like a son escaping the domination of his parents. The escape is not just one rupture. It is a long and half-secret process. So with the American. He was a European when he first went over the Atlantic. He is the main recreant European still. From Benjamin Franklin to Woodrow Wilson may be a long stride, but it is a stride along the same road. There is no new road. The same old road, become dreary and futile. Theoretic and materialistic.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Studies in Classic American Literature
If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink at last, as human psychology.
D. H. LAWRENCE
St. Mawr
I wonder which was more frightened among old tribes -- those bursting out of their darkness of woods upon all the space of light, or those from the open tiptoeing into the forests.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Sons and Lovers
Nothing is as bad as a marriage that's a hopeless failure.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Sons and Lovers
A woman unsatisfied must have luxuries. But a woman who loves a man would sleep on a board.
D. H. LAWRENCE
letter to John Middleton Murry, November 27, 1913
It is curious, too, that though the modern man in the street is a robot, and incapable of love
he is capable of an endless, grinding, nihilistic hate:
that is the only strong feeling he is capable of;
and therein lies the danger of robot-democracy and all the men in the street,
they move in a great grind of hate, slowly but inevitably.
D. H. LAWRENCE
"Robot Feelings", The Complete Poems
But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Women in Love
A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Patience! Patience! The world is a vast and ghastly intricacy of mechanism, and one has to be very wary, not to get mangled by it.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Lady Chatterley's Lover
The only principle I can see in this life, is that one must forfeit the less for the greater.
D. H. LAWRENCE
letter to John Middleton Murry, November 27, 1913
Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Studies in Classic American Literature
Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Studies in Classic American Literature
Love's a dog in a manger.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Sons and Lovers
A man will part with anything so long as he's drunk, and you're drunk with him.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Sons and Lovers
In the oldest religion, everything was alive, not supernaturally but naturally alive. There were only deeper and deeper streams of life, vibrations of life more and more vast. So rocks were alive, but a mountain had a deeper, vaster life than a rock, and it was much harder for a man to bring his spirit, or his energy, into contact with the life of a mountain, and so he drew strength from the mountain, as from a great standing well of life, than it was to come into contact with the rock. And he had to put forth a great religious effort. For the whole life-effort of man was to get his life into contact with the elemental life of the cosmos, mountain-life, cloud-life, thunder-life, air-life, earth-life, sun-life. To come into the immediate felt contact, and so derive energy, power, and a dark sort of joy. This effort into sheer naked contact, without an intermediary or mediator, is the root meaning of religion.
D. H. LAWRENCE
"New Mexico", Phoenix: the posthumous papers of D. H. Lawrence
I love trying things and discovering how I hate them.
D. H. LAWRENCE
letter to Earl Brewster, May 15, 1922
What a frail, easily hurt, rather pathetic thing a human body is, naked; somehow a little unfinished, incomplete!
D. H. LAWRENCE
Lady Chatterley's Lover
It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.
D. H. LAWRENCE
letter to Ada Lawrence, April 9, 1911
Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Sons and Lovers