D.H. Lawrence Quotes

"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically."

"The great living experience for every man is his adventure into the woman. The man embraces in the woman all that is not himself, and from that one resultant, from that embrace, comes every new action."

"The horse, the horse! The symbol of surging potency and power of movement, of action."

"America is neither free nor brave, but a land of tight, iron-clanking little wills, everybody trying to put it over everybody else, and a land of men absolutely devoid of the real courage of trust, trust in life's sacred spontaneity. They can't trust life until they can control it."

"America does to me what I knew it would do: it just bumps me. The people charge at you like trucks coming down on you -- no awareness. But one tries to dodge aside in time. Bump! bump! go the trucks. And that is human contact."

"I cannot get any sense of an enemy - only of a disaster."

"I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams."

"Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither."

"Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me! / A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time."

"This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten."

"Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description."

"In every living thing there is the desire for love."

"Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration."

"The world is wonderful and beautiful and good beyond one's wildest imagination. Never, never, never could one conceive what love is, beforehand, never. Life can be great --quite god-like. It can be so. God be thanked I have proved it."

"Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon."

"Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it."

"The deadly Hydra now is the hydra of Equality. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity is the three-fanged serpent."

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

"Tragedy is like strong acid -- it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth."

"The Moon! Artemis! the great goddess of the splendid past of men! Are you going to tell me she is a dead lump?"