D. H. Lawrence

"Men and women aren't really dogs: they only look like it and behave like it. Somewhere inside there is a great chagrin and a gnawing discontent."

"Of course Celia shits! Who doesn't? And how much worse if she didn't."

"Augustine said that God created the universe new every day: and to the living, emotional soul, this is true. Every dawn dawns upon an entirely new universe, every Easter lights up an entirely new glory of a new world opening in utterly new flower. And the soul of man and the soul of woman is new in the same way, with the infinite delight of life and the ever-newness of life. So a man and a woman are new to one another throughout a life-time, in the rhythm of marriage that matches the rhythm of the year."

"Sex is the balance of male and female in the universe, the attraction, the repulsion, the transit of neutrality, the new attraction, the new repulsion, always different, always new. The long neuter spell of Lent, when the blood is low, and the delight of the Easter kiss, the sexual revel of spring, the passion of midsummer, the slow recoil, revolt, and grief of autumn, greyness again, then the sharp stimulus of winter of the long nights. Sex goes through the rhythm of the year, in man and woman, ceaselessly changing: the rhythm of the sun in his relation to the earth. Oh, what a catastrophe for man when he cut himself off from the rhythm of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and the setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and the equinox! This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilised vase on the table."

"Marriage is the clue to human life, but there is no marriage apart from the wheeling sun and the nodding earth, from the straying of the planets and the magnificance of the fixed stars. Is not a man different, utterly different, at dawn from what he is at sunset? And a woman too? And does not the changing harmony and discord of their variation make the secret music of life?"

"When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language."

"I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections. And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill. I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help and patience, and a certain difficult repentance long, difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself from the endless repetition of the mistake which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify."

"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."

"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!"

"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!"

"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."

"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."

"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. ""

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

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

"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."

"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!"

"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."

"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."

"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)."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Unser Zeitalter ist seinem Wesen nach tragisch, also weigern wir uns, es tragisch zu nehmen. Die Katastrophe ist hereingebrochen, wir stehen vor den Trümmern, wir fangen an, neue kleine Gewohnheiten zu bilden, neue kleine Hoffnungen zu hegen. Es ist ein hartes Stück Arbeit: Kein ebener Weg führt in die Zukunft; wir umgehen die Hindernisse jedoch oder klettern über sie hinweg. Wir müssen leben – einerlei, wie viele Himmel eingestürzt sind."