D. H. LAWRENCE QUOTES II

English author (1885-1930)

D. H. Lawrence quote

The bitch-goddess, Success, was trailed by thousands of gasping dogs with lolling tongues.

D. H. LAWRENCE

Lady Chatterley's Lover

Tags: success


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

Tags: Benjamin Franklin


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


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

Tags: psychology


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

Tags: sacrifice


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

Tags: women


Love's a dog in a manger.

D. H. LAWRENCE

Sons and Lovers


But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.

D. H. LAWRENCE

Women in Love

Tags: boredom


Nothing is as bad as a marriage that's a hopeless failure.

D. H. LAWRENCE

Sons and Lovers

Tags: marriage


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


A man will part with anything so long as he's drunk, and you're drunk with him.

D. H. LAWRENCE

Sons and Lovers


A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it.

D. H. LAWRENCE

Lady Chatterley's Lover

Tags: life


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

Tags: tradition


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

Tags: life


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

Tags: obedience


I love trying things and discovering how I hate them.

D. H. LAWRENCE

letter to Earl Brewster, May 15, 1922


Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.

D. H. LAWRENCE

Studies in Classic American Literature


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

Tags: animism


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