D. H. Lawrence Quotes
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Morality in the novel is the trembling instability of the balance. When the novelist puts his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection, that is immorality.
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The true artist doesn't substitute immorality for morality. On the contrary, he always substitutes a finer morality for a grosser one.
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God how I hate new countries: They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like senility than anything.
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They say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates.
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It is so much more difficult to live with one's body than with one's soul. One's body is so much more exacting: what it won't have it won't have, and nothing can make bitter into sweet.
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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.
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'I suppose that's what we do in death⎯⎯⎯sleep in wonder.'
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The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.
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Folks should do their own fuckin', then they wouldn't want to listen to a lot of clatfart about another man's.
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I want to go south, where there is no autumn, where the cold doesn't crouch over one like a snow leopard waiting to pounce. The heart of the North is dead, and the fingers of cold are corpse fingers.
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It was in 1915 the old world ended.
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Only in a novel are all things given full play.
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I don't believe any more in democracy. But I can't believe in the old sort of aristocracy, either, nor can I wish it back, splendid as it was. What I believe in is the old Homeric aristocracy, when the grandeur was inside a man, and he lived in a simple wooden house.
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I believe in being warm-hearted. I believe especially in being warm-hearted in love, in fucking with a warm heart. I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the women take it warm-heartedly, everything would come all right. It's all the cold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy.
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Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven't really got.
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The proper study of mankind is man in his relation to his deity.
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Their whole life depends on spending money, and now they’ve got none to spend. That’s our civilization and our education: bring up the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money gives out.
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Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art - or almost the only stuff.
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The Italians are not passionate: passion has deep reserves. They are easily moved, and often affectionate, but they rarely have any abiding passion of any sort.
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The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few in most personal experience. There's lots of good fish in the sea ... maybe ... but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you're not mackerel or herring yourself you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.
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When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.
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To the Puritan all things are impure, as somebody says.
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Whatever God there is is slowly eliminating the guts and alimentary system from the human being, to evolve a higher, more spiritual being.
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My God, these folks don't know how to love - that's why they love so easily.