D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence (11 September 1885 - 2 March 1930) was one of the most important English writers of the 20th century.

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If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly, and a Cinematograph working brightly; then I’d go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them in, all the sick, the halt, and the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile me a weary thanks; and the band would softly bubble out the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’.
- 1908 letter [1]

Tragedy ought really to be a great kick at misery.
- Letter to A W McLeod, 6th October 1912

God is only a great imaginative experience.
- Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, pt. 4, ed. by E. McDonald, (1936)

He talked to her endlessly about his love of horizontals: how they, the great levels of sky and land in Lincolnshire, meant to him the eternality of the will, just as the bowed Norman arches of the church, repeating themselves, meant the dogged leaping forward of the persistent human soul, on and on, nobody knows where; in contradiction to the perpendicular lines and to the Gothic arch, which, he said, leapt up at heaven and touched the ecstasy and lost itself in the divine.
- Sons and Lovers, 1913

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 into heaven in the Palmerston Arms."
- Sons and Lovers
- Edited out of the 1913 edition, restored in 1992

But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.
- Women in Love, chapter 15

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it
- Studies in Classic American Literature, 1923

What man most passionately wants is his living wholeness and his living unison, not his own isolate salvation of his "soul." Man wants his physical fulfilment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul, as my spirit is part of my nation. In my own very self, I am part of my family. There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.
- Apocalypse, 1930

To the Puritan all things are impure, as somebody says
- Sketches of Etruscan Places, 1932

I never saw a wild thing
Sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.
- Self-Pity, 1929

Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!
- Song of a Man who has Come Through, 1917

It was in 1915 the old world ended.
- Kangaroo (The Nightmare chapter), 1923

The more scholastically educated a man is generally, the more he is an emotional boor.
- John Galsworthy, 1927

Every man has a mob self and an individual self, in varying proportions.
- Pornograpy and Obscenity, 1929

Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it.
- Pornograpy and Obscenity, 1929

The nature of the infant is not just a new permutation-and-combination of elements contained in the natures of the parents. There is in the nature of the infant that which is utterly unknown in the natures of the parents.
- Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, 1921

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.
- A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover, 1929

Of course Celia shits! Who doesn't? And how much worse if she didn't.
- A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover, 1929

I can't stand Willy wet-leg,
can't stand him at any price.
He's resigned, and when you hit him
he lets you hit him twice.
- Willy Wet Leg, 1929

Censors are dead men
set up to judge between life and death.
For no live, sunny man would be a censor,
he'd just laugh.
- Censors, 1929

The dead don't die. They look on and help.
- Letter to John Middleton Murry, 2nd February 1923

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.
- Letter to John Middleton Murry, 3rd October 1924

Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley's Lover has just been reissued by Grove Press, and this fictional account of the day-by-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of considerable interest to outdoor-minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper. Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour these sidelights on the management of a Midland shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion this book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller's Practical Gamekeeping."
- Ed Zern, Field & Stream magazine, November 1959. Reprinted in Best of Ed Zern: Fifty Years of Fishing and Hunting from One of America's Best-Loved Outdoor Humorists, ISBN 1585743429.