Quotes About D.H. Lawrence

If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing.

On the strength of his literary output alone... any woman of sense would decline to tackle D.H. Lawrence at 1,000 pounds a night.

These lines of D.H. Lawrence are taped to the wall of my office: What is the knocking? What is the knocking at the door in the night? It is somebody wants to do us harm. No, no, it is the three strange angels. Admit them, admit them. I under[stand] that failure is surely one of these strange angels.

I can still remember the afternoon, on my 15th birthday, when I opened up 'The Virgin and the Gypsy,' D.H. Lawrence's novella, in my tiny cell in boarding school, and whole worlds of possibility opened out that I had never guessed existed. The language was on fire and sang of liberation.

I have a romantic conception of the writer's life, and the sort of writer's life that I admire is probably a childless life, possibly a marriageless life, certainly a travelling life - I'm in awe of how much D.H. Lawrence managed to get around. But that's never been something I'm capable of doing.

There has been so much action in the past," said D.H. Lawrence, "especially sexual action, a wearying repetition over and over, without a corresponding thought, a corresponding realization. Now our business is to realize sex. Today the full conscious realization of sex is even more important than the act itself.

People who read D.H. Lawrence suspect that the forbidden is not necessarily without its virtue, and so are easily persuaded that the forbidden and the virtuous are one and the same.

Yet the heart of each burned from the other. They burned with each other, inwardly. This they would never admit. They intended to keep their relationship a casual free-and-easy friendship, they were not going to be so unmanly and unnatural as to allow any heart-burning between them. They had not the faintest belief in deep relationship between men and men, and their disbelief prevented any development of their powerful but suppressed friendliness.

But he was quite consciously afraid of society, which he knew by instinct to be a malevolent, partly insane beast.

In his dark eyes was a deep misery which he wore with the same ease and pleasantness as he wore his close-sitting clothes.

His suave loins of darkness, dark-clad and suave

He had a sense of foreboding. No sense of wrong or sin; he was troubled by no conscience in that respect. He knew that conscience was chiefly fear of society, or fear of oneself. He was not afraid of himself. But he was quite consciously afraid of society, which he knew by instinct to be a malevolent, partly-insane beast.

Really! But weren't you fearfully tempted?' 'In the abstract but not in the concrete,' said Ursula. 'When it comes to the point, one isn't even tempted—oh, if I were tempted, I'd marry like a shot. I'm only tempted NOT to.' The faces of both sisters suddenly lit up with amusement.

This act of masculine clumsiness was the spear through the side of her love for Morel.

No, it's man that poisons the universe," she asserted.

Nothing else, sir? came the neutral voice, like one in a dream.

And it seemed she was like the sea, nothing but dark waves rising and heaving, heaving with a great swell, so that slowly her whole darkness was in motion, and she was Ocean rolling its dark, dumb mass.

Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste than Herman Melville.

Oh, I've no patience with these romances. They're the ruin of all order. It's a thousand pities they ever happened

Are you always like this? he asked. Loathing the very flesh on your bones, and the words of your mouth? It's only the unnatural things, she replied. When things natural they are beautiful. And what isn't natural? he asked. Everything man had made, she answered, including himself.

But one truth does not displace another. Even apparently contradictory truths do not displace one another. Logic is far too coarse to make the subtle distinctions life demands.

Mrs Morel always said the after-life would hold nothing in store for her husband: he rose from the lower world into purgatory, when he came home from pit, and passed on to heaven in the Palmerston Arms.

Now my own followers will want to do me to death again, for having risen up different from their expectation.

Take my words, and fling Them down on the counter roundly; See if they ring.