D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Richards Lawrencewas an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works, among other things, represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, some of the issues Lawrence explores are emotional health, vitality, spontaneity and instinct...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth11 September 1885
actual attempts crazy experience fixed illustrate museum order rigged theories unsound vital wants
Museums, museums, museums, object-lessons rigged out to illustrate the unsound theories of archaeologists, crazy attempts to co-ordinate and get into a fixed order that which has no fixed order and will not be co-coordinated! It is sickening! Why must all experience be systematized? A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.
noise outside secret sensitive
Is it the secret of the long-nosed Etruscans?/ The long-nosed, sensitive footed, subtly-smiling Etruscans, / Who made so little noise outside the cypress groves?
knowledge life living man meeting men-and-women source
The source of all life and knowledge is in man and woman, and the source of all living is in the interchange and the meeting and mingling of these two: man-life and woman-life, man-knowledge and woman-knowledge, man-being and woman-being.
alone capable people perhaps
Perhaps only those people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the world.
audience book books leaves nor reader reads safe seat stage thick ticket wants whoever
After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.
air analysis anatomy course criticism cut dirty human interest laboratory means morbid people personal psychology raises subtle waiting
Always this same morbid interest in other people and their doings, their privacies, their dirty linen, always this air of alertness for personal happenings, personalities, personalities, personalities. Always this subtle criticism and appraisal of other people, this analysis of other people's motives. If anatomy presupposes a corpse, then psychology presupposes a world of corpses. Personalities, which means personal criticism and analysis, presuppose a whole world laboratory of human psyches waiting to be vivisected. If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink, at last, as human psychology.
abnormal craving eternal fill shortage
You don't want to love--your eternal and abnormal craving is to be loved. You aren't positive, you're negative. You absorb, absorb, as if you must fill yourself up with love, because you've got a shortage somewhere.
bourgeois inevitably itself length opposite produces truth
The bourgeois produces the bolshevist, inevitably as every half-truth at length produces the contradiction of itself in the opposite half-truth.
christian greatness past venture
I know the greatness of Christianity; it is a past greatness.... I live in 1924, and the Christian venture is done.
abhorrent act art cannot goes michael touch unseen work
I feel I cannot touch humanity, even in thought, it is abhorrent to me. But a work of art is an act of faith, as Michael Angelo says, and one goes on writing, to the unseen witnesses.
atone cannot cursing dreadful filthy god hearts laughing mission possible shall short speaks suffering vicious
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?
afloat bad blood catch child flat jacket life lonely miserable sail sea single worn
I don't like your miserable lonely single ''front name.'' It is so limited, so meager; it has no versatility; it is weighted down with the sense of responsibility; it is worn threadbare with much use; it is as bad as having only one jacket and one hat; it is like having only one relation, one blood relation, in the world. Never set a child afloat on the flat sea of life with only one sail to catch the wind.
cannot care cure english-writer follies mean taste thinking woeful
I cannot cure myself of that most woeful of youth's follies -- thinking that those who care about us will care for the things that mean much to us.
again
Then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.