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And what's romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything As You Like It, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose and it's always daisy-time.
D. H. Lawrence
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America exhausts the springs of one's soul - I suppose that's what it exists for. It lives to see all real spontaneity expire. But anyhow it doesn't grind on an old nerve as Europe seems to.
D. H. Lawrence
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Homer was wrong in saying, "Would that strife might pass away from among gods and men!" He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe.
D. H. Lawrence
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I'd wipe the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake.
D. H. Lawrence
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If it be not true to me, What care I how true it be.. Though it be not true to thee, It's gay and gospel truth to me.
D. H. Lawrence
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The world is a raving idiot, and no man can kill it: though I’ll do my best. But you’re right. We must rescue ourselves as best we can.
D. H. Lawrence
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Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose.
D. H. Lawrence
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Why, why are people all balls of bitter dust? Because they won't fall off the tree when they're ripe. They hang on to their old positions when the position is overpast, till they become infested with little worms and dry-rot.
D. H. Lawrence
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You don't want to be an animal, you want to observe your own animal functions, so as to get a mental thrill out of them. It is allpurely secondary--and more decadent than the most hide-bound intellectualism.
D. H. Lawrence
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You're always begging things to love you," he said, "as if you were a beggar for love. Even the flowers, you have to fawn on them--
D. H. Lawrence
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I like Australia less and less. The hateful newness, the democratic conceit, every man a little pope of perfection.
D. H. Lawrence
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I have lived among enough painters and around studios to have had all the theories - and how contradictory they are - rammed down my throat. A man has to have a gizzard like an ostrich to digest all the brass-tacks and wire nails of modern art theories.
D. H. Lawrence
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Don't talk to me any more about poetry for months -- unless it is other men's work. I really love verse, even rubbish. But I'm fearfully busy at a novel, and brush all the gossamer of verse off my face.
D. H. Lawrence
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How to begin to educate a child. First rule: leave him alone. Second rule: leave him alone. Third rule: leave him alone. That is the whole beginning.
D. H. Lawrence
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The true self is not aware that it is a self. A bird, as it sings, sings itself. But not according to a picture. It has no idea of itself.
D. H. Lawrence
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Most fatal, most hateful of all things is bullying.... Sensual bullying of course is fairly easily detected. What is more dangerous is ideal bullying. Bullying people into what is ideally good for them.
D. H. Lawrence
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And woman is the same as horses: two wills act in opposition inside her. With one will she wants to subject herself utterly. With the other she wants to bolt, and pitch her rider to perdition.
D. H. Lawrence
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Every new stroke of civilization has cost the lives of countless brave men, who have fallen defeated by the dragon, in their efforts to win the apples of the Hesperides, or the fleece of gold. Fallen in their efforts to overcome the old, half sordid savagery of the lower stages of creation, and win the next stage.
D. H. Lawrence
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Any novel of importance has a purpose. If only the "purpose" be large enough, and not at outs with the passional inspiration.
D. H. Lawrence
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My wife has a beastly habit of comparing poetry -- all literature in fact -- to the droppings of the goats among the rocks -- mere excreta that fertilises the ground it falls on.
D. H. Lawrence
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When I hear modern people complain of being lonely then I know what has happened. They have lost the cosmos.
D. H. Lawrence
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I should like [people] to like the purely individual thing in themselves, which makes them act in singleness. and They only like to do the collective thing.
D. H. Lawrence
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The past. The Golden Age of the past. What a nostalgia we all feel for it. Yet we don't want it when we get it. Try the South Seas.
D. H. Lawrence
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I cannot be a materialist - but Oh, how is it possible that a God who speaks to all hearts can let Belgravia go laughing to a vicious luxury, and Whitechapel cursing to a filthy debauchery - such suffering, such dreadful suffering - and shall the short years of Christ's mission atone for it all?
D. H. Lawrence
