D. H. Lawrence Quotes

United Kingdom, Playwright
September 11, 1885 – March, 2, 1930.

David Herbert Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter. His collected works represent, among other things, an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation. Some of the issues Lawrence explores are sexuality, emotional health, vitality, spontaneity, and instinct.

Also known as Translator, Essayist, Poet, Novelist, Painter, Literary Critic

There is no evolving, only unfolding. The lily is in the bit of dust which is its beginning, lily and nothing but lily: and the lily in blossom is a ne plus ultra: there is no evolving beyond.

D. H. Lawrence
- Beginning
That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic: invisibility, and the anaesthetic power to deaden my attention in your direction.

D. H. Lawrence
- Power
- Attention
- Magic

I never know when I sit down, just what I am going to write. I make no plan; it just comes, and I don't know where it comes from.

D. H. Lawrence
- Writing
- Knows
- Plans
You're spending your life without renewing it. You've got to be amused, properly healthily amused. You're spending your vitality without making any. Can't go on you know. Depression! Avoid depression!

D. H. Lawrence
- Life
- Depression
Only at his maximum does an individual surpass all his derivative elements, and become purely himself. And most people never get there. In his own pure individuality a man surpasses his father and mother, and is utterly unknown to them.

D. H. Lawrence
- People
- Mother
- Father
That was the birth of sin. Not doing it, but KNOWING about it. Before the apple, [Adam and Eve] had shut their eyes and their minds had gone dark. Now, they peeped and pried and imagined. They watched themselves.

D. H. Lawrence
- Knowledge
- Eyes
- Dark
For God's sake, all of you, say spiteful things about me, then I shall know I mean something to you. Don't say surgaries, or I'm done.

D. H. Lawrence
- God
- Done
What one does in one's art, that is the breath of one's being. What one does in one's life, that is a bagatelle for the outsiders to fuss about.

D. H. Lawrence
- Life
- Art

Don't be sucked in by the su-superior, don't swallow the culture bait, don't drink, don't drink and get beerier and beerier, do learn to discriminate.

D. H. Lawrence
- Culture
Paris was sad. One of the saddest towns: weary of its now-mechanical sensuality, weary of the tension of money, money, money, weary even of resentment and conceit, just weary to death, and still not sufficiently Americanized or Londonized to hide the weariness under a mechanical jig-jig-jig!

D. H. Lawrence
- Money
- Death
- Sad