Literary Critics

"To him boredom was a tragedy, for he had no more realization than if he had been an animal that any state he was in would ever come to an end."

"But just as it sometimes happens that the most temperate people, who have never acquired the habit of drinking alcohol, or even a taste for it, are tormented by the fear that somehow or other they will one day find themselves drunk, so Isabelle perpetually feared that she might be betrayed into an impulsive act that was destructive to such order as reason had imposed on life. Therefore she was forever running her faculty of analysis over in her mind with the preposterous zeal of an adolescent running a razor over his beardless chin."

"There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all."

"The point is that nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth."

"I do not myself find it agreeable to be 90, and I cannot imagine why it should seem so to other people. It is not that you have any fears about your own death, it is that your upholstery is already dead around you."

"After any disturbance (such as two world wars coinciding with a period of growing economic and monetary incomprehensibility) we find our old concepts inadequate and look for new ones. But it unfortunately happens that the troubled times which produce an appetite for new ideas are the least propitious for clear thinking."

"Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each other. But it is not so widely realized that even less can one trust what people say about themselves."

"Present-day women's lib … is repudiation of the obligation to follow a certain pattern if you are a woman. It is much more fundamental than suffragism. And, on the whole, I am with it."

"Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse."

"The word “idiot” comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: men are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature."

"I am for the legal government of Republican Spain against Franco, since Spain herself, at a properly conducted election, chose that Government and rejected the party which now supports Franco. I am also against Fascism; the reforms of Diocletian were a work of genius and made many people temporarily happy, but failed in the end and added greatly to human misery. I see no reason why this inferior modern copy of them should succeed."

"It would seem … that man has been shocked by the war into forgetting how to be a political animal. This suspicion is confirmed by the spread of Fascism, which is a headlong flight into fantasy from the necessity for political thought. There is nothing more obvious about the post-war situation than that it is novel, springs from causes which have not yet been analysed, and cannot be relieved until this analysis is complete and has been made the basis of a new social formula. Yet persons supporting Fascism behave as if man were already in possession of principles which would enable him to deal with all our problems, and as if it were only a question of appointing a dictator to apply them."

"There have been many legends invented about Charlemagne, but he was no legend. Out of the shattered ruins of the ancient world he built the modern world, and even now reflection on his feat quickens the pulse. It was an achievement as daring as any long transoceanic flight of our day, but it called also for endurance lasting not hours but decades, and for adventure of the mind as well as of the body ; a vast new political trajectory was described as well as a military one."

"For one cannot serve the national spirit merely by getting a lump in the throat whenever one catches sight of the Union Jack, or by seeing red when a newspaper reports that some foreign power has acted aggressively towards England. These reactions bear the same relation to true love of country that a chance encounter between a man and a woman who meet in the street bears to a happy marriage."

"Il sole / ridea calando dietro il Resegone"

"To thee of All Being /A te, de l’essere"

"I want to say I may have seen my son die this morning."

"There is no simple way to say this."

"In our online descriptions and program literature we describe the cloisters as a public sphere for networked interaction, the gathering place for students, professors, and librarians engaged in planning, evaluating, or reviewing the efforts of research and study utilizing the whole range of technologies of literacy. We go further and describe the task of the cloisters as to "channel flows of research, learning and teaching between the increasingly networked world of the library and the intimacy and engagement of our classrooms and other campus spaces". There we continue to explore the "collectible object", which I tentatively described in Othermindedness in terms of maintaining an archive of "the successive choices, the errors and losses, of our own human community" and suggesting that what constitutes the collectible object is the value which suffuses our choices. It seemed to me then that electronic media are especially suited to tracking such "changing change". I think it still seems so to me now but I do fear we have lost track of the beauty and nimbleness of new media in representing and preserving the meaning-making quotidian, the ordinary mindfulness which makes human life possible and valuable. It is interesting, I think, that recounting and rehearsing this notion leaves this interview layered and speckled with (self) quotations, documentations, implicit genealogies, images, and traditions of continuity, change, and difference. Perhaps the most quoted line of afternoon over the years has been the sentence "There is no simple way to say this." The same is true of any attempt to describe the way in which the collectible object participates in (I use this word as a felicitous shorthand for the complex of ideas involved in what I called "representing and preserving the meaning-making quotidian" above) the library as living archive."

"I was just telling my students about first reading D. H. Lawrence and having that feeling: it is done, I need not do more or attempt to... I would have to say – and this is less hubris, I swear, than a humble recognition from what others say about reading my work – that I have a way of shaping the experience of the text so that it becomes like a maze of mirrors set at angles to each other, not a funhouse labyrinth exactly nor the mirror in mirror, but rather an angularity wherein the mirror mirrors the blue opening as well as the opposing surface so that surface and opening multiply and intertwine."

""Hypertext is a representation of the text which escapes and surprises by turns," I wrote. Given the pure unaccountability (it is literally impossible to read all the possible variations of a richly linked hypertext) a hyperfiction writer is always attuned to "how the reader will interpret the literature presented" since its presentation shifts and flows in its composition as well."

"Folks should do their own fuckin', then they wouldn't want to listen to a lot of clatfart about another man's."

"Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley's Lover has just been reissued by Grove Press, and this fictional account of the day-by-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of considerable interest to outdoor-minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper. Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour these sidelights on the management of a Midland shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion this book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller's Practical Gamekeeping."

"It seems to us now that his system, for all its fervour, was largely negative, a mere assertion of his denial of the system of his upbringing. His God, for instance, must be the exact opposite of the 'gentle Jesus' of his childhood. There must be nothing at all gentle about the "dark" force to which the dark independent outlaws of his dreams would owe a sort of reverence. . . .The community to which Lawrence looked forward, the leaders and the led, is established. Men act, instead of wasting their energies in abstract thought. And yet, if Lawrence had seen it, he would have been appalled. Fascism finally succeeded, at least temporarily, in making the synthesis that eluded Lawrence."

"He had a mystical philosophy of "blood" which I disliked. "There is," he said, "another seat of consciousness than the brain and nerves. There is a blood consciousness which exists in us independently of the ordinary mental consciousness. One lives, knows and has one's being in the blood, without any reference to nerves and brain. This is one half of life belonging to the darkness. When I take a woman, then the blood percept is supreme. My blood knowing is overwhelming. We should realize that we have a blood being, a blood consciousness, a blood soul complete and apart from a mental and nerve consciousness." This seemed to me frankly rubbish, and I rejected it vehemently, though I did not then know that it led straight to Auschwitz."

"The way he writes about flowers and birds and turtles always gets me. I like it much better than when he writes about sex in people. It's much less self-serving (You don't want that orgasm, Frieda, really you don't) and rooted in empathy."

"You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book (Lady Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with Richard, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death."

"I had a feeling that Pandora's box contained the mysteries of woman's sensuality, so different from man's and for which man's language was inadequate. The language of sex had yet to be invented. The language of the senses was yet to be explored. D. H. Lawrence began to give instinct a language, he tried to escape the clinical, the scientific, which only captures what the body feels."

"These women discerned in Lawrence something primitive, something akin to their own nature. Like them, he had a taste for magic. His wife has said that he alone could teach human beings the art of living. Frail as he was, and so near to death, he had a religious awareness of moments of happiness. Before living with him, she declared, she had not lived at all. Those are the words of a woman whole-heartedly in love... Above all, he offered them that mixture of strength and weakness which satisfies women more than any other trait, because it rouses at once the maternal and the lover's passion."

"What was the secret of this power which Lawrence had over women? The art of pleasing? But he was brutal and often offensive. He forced Frieda, accustomed to a life of comfort, to wash clothes, do the kitchen work, carry bedroom pails. In moments of anger he would throw crockery about. Sometimes he struck her, and she struck back. To some of his friends who had difficulty in getting on with their wives, he would advise them to use physical force."

"The number of people who can copulate properly may be few; the number who can write well are infinitely fewer."

"Lawrence was a powerful early influence on me, Forster a more enduring one."

"when I was a kid, of course. I would read D. H. Lawrence and then I would turn out an absolute dreadful ten pages of D. H. Lawrence, or Tolstoy, or what have you, but only when I was a kid. The process of becoming a writer is the process of learning your own voice, and how to speak in your language, not somebody else's. It was along in my mid-to-late twenties that I began to get the skill to talk my own language."

"Is there no name later than Conrad's to be included in the Great Tradition? There is, I am convinced, one: D.H. Lawrence. Lawrence, in the English language, was the great genius of our time (I mean the age, or climatic phase, following Conrad's)."

"Lady Chatterley's Lover defies reproduction in any manner whatever that would convey to our readers the abysm of filth into which Mr. D. H. Lawrence has descended. We have said that it is the foulest book in English literature. Though our knowledge of excursions in the lascivious by Oriental writers is limited, we do not hesitate to say that if a search were made through all the literatures of all the ages, as foul a book might be found, but certainly not a fouler. Mr. Lawrence is a great artist. It is because of this that his book excels in filth. A merely nasty-minded novelist of limited talent could not have written it. It was created, and created only, out of the turgid vigour of a poisoned genius. We leave it at that."

"There has been brought to our notice within the last few weeks a book which we have no hesitation in describing as the most evil outpouring that has ever besmirched the literature of our country. The sewers of French pornography would be dragged in vain to find a parallel in beastliness. The creations of muddy-minded perverts, peddled in the back-street bookstalls of Paris[,] are prudish by comparison."

"Isn’t it remarkable how everyone who knew Lawrence has felt compelled to write about him? Why, he’s had more books written about him than any writer since Byron!"

"Lawrence’s special and characteristic gift was an extraordinary sensitiveness to what Wordsworth called “unknown modes of being.” He was always intensely aware of the mystery of the world, and the mystery was always for him a numen, divine. Lawrence could never forget, as most of us almost continuously forget, the dark presence of the otherness that lies beyond the boundaries of man’s conscious mind. This special sensibility was accompanied by a prodigious power of rendering the immediately experienced otherness in terms of literary art."

"many writers seem intent on what D. H. Lawrence called "doing dirt on life.""

"D.H. Lawrence, De Maupassant, Chekhov, and Hemingway were also a great influence on me when I first began to write short stories, very different as they all are. But, then who is there, what modern writer of short stories has not been influenced by those four? They created the modern short story."

"When you have seen this book [Lady Chatterley's Lover] and, making all such allowances in favour of it as you can, the prosecution will invite you to say that it does tend, and certainly may tend, to induce lustful thoughts in the minds of those who read it. It goes further, you may think. It sets on a pedestal promiscuous intercourse and it commends and sets out to commend sensuality almost as a virtue, and encourages and even advocates coarseness and vulgarity of thought and language. You may think it must tend to deprave the minds certainly of some, and maybe many, of the persons who are likely to buy it at the price of 3s. 6d. and who read it, with 200,000 copies already printed and ready for release. You may think that one of the ways in which you can test the book, and test it from the most liberal outlook, is to ask yourselves the question when you have read it through: "Would you approve of your young sons and daughters—because girls can read as well as boys—reading this book?" Is it a book you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?"

"Consider...the situation in Britain in this century. After Joyce and Virginia Woolf, fiction of any quality seemed to die out. Such puny men as D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster acquired the status of giants."

"there are moments in The Dispossessed when I am reminded of Lawrence: for instance, a wonderful scene of lovemaking...It almost reads like Lawrence minus the sexism."

"Now he is dead, and the low-brows whom he scandalized have united with the high-brows whom he bored to ignore his greatness. This cannot be helped; no one who alienates both Mrs Grundy and Aspatia [sic] can hope for a good obituary press. All that we can do...is to say straight out that he was the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation. The rest must be left where he would have wished it to be left – in the hands of the young."

"The British novelist and critic D. H. Lawrence, who lived in northern New Mexico for two years, conceptualized the US origin myth, invoking Cooper's frontiersman character Deerslayer: "You have there the myth of the essential America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. ""

"The picture of D.H Lawrence suggested by the obituary notices of ‘competent critics’ is of a man morose, frustrated, tortured, even a sinister failure. Perhaps this is because any other view of him would make his critics look rather silly...Lawrence was as little morose as an open clematis flower, as little tortured or sinister, or hysterical as a humming bird. Gay, skilful, clever at everything, furious when he felt like it but never grieved or upset, intensely amusing, without sentimentality or affection, almost always right in his touch for the content of things or persons, he was at once the most harmonious and the most vital person I ever saw."

"Who is it that clasps and kneads my naked feet, till they unfold, till all is well, till all is utterly well? the lotus-lilies of the feet! I tell you, it is no woman, it is no man, for I am alone. And I fall asleep with the gods, the gods that are not, or that are according to the soul’s desire, like a pool into which we plunge, or do not plunge."

"There are no gods, and you can please yourself have a game of tennis, go out in the car, do some shopping, sit and talk, talk, talk with a cigarette browning your fingers. There are no gods, and you can please yourself — go and please yourself — But leave me alone, leave me alone, to myself!"

"I refuse to name the gods, because they have no name. I refuse to describe the gods, because they have no form nor shape nor substance. Ah, but the simple ask for images! Then for a time at least, they must do without. But all the time I see the gods: the man who is moving the tall white corn, suddenly, it curves, as it yields, the white wheat and sinks down with a swift rustle, and a strange, falling flatness, ah! the gods, the swaying body of god!"

"The gods are nameless and imageless yet looking in a great full lime-tree of summer I suddenly saw deep into the eyes of gods: it is enough."