D. H. Lawrence quotes

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

I went to a French literary tea yesterday – with Mauriac and a few more – ye gods, how literary – the Lord made Adam out of printer's ink, in Paris.

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

We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled.

Sex is really only touch, the closest of all touch. And it's touch we're afraid of. We're only half-conscious, and half alive.

It's the courage of your own tenderness, that's what it is: like when you put your hand on my tail and say I've got a pretty tail.

I stand for the touch of bodily awareness between human beings, and the touch of tenderness.

Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar, but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day. And that is all that matters.

Away with eternal truth. Truth lives from day to day, and the marvellous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh to-day.

Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. The moment you can do just what you like, there is nothing you care about doing. Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes.

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

The essential function of art is moral. Not æsthetic, not decorative, not pastime and recreation. But moral.

It is true, what I say; there is a beyond, in you, in me, which is further than love, beyond the scope, as stars are beyond the scope of vision, some of them.

He would not take that direction, to the darkness, to follow her. He walked towards the faintly humming, glowing town, quickly.

She saw in the rainbow the earth's new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few in most personal experience.

A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it.

It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead.

England my England! but which is my England?

The industrial England blots out the agricultural England. One meaning blots out another. The new England blots out the old England. And the continuity is not organic, but mechanical.

Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe.

Money poisons you when you've got it, and starves you when you haven't.