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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People always make war when they say they love peace.
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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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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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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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'I suppose that's what we do in death⎯⎯⎯sleep in wonder.'
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It was in 1915 the old world ended.
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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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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 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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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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Only in a novel are all things given full play.
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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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Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven't really got.
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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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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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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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The proper study of mankind is man in his relation to his deity.
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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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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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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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To the Puritan all things are impure, as somebody says.
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The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.