D. H. Lawrence

Only in a novel are all things given full play.

The true artist doesn't substitute immorality for morality. On the contrary, he always substitutes a finer morality for a grosser one.

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

The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters - not to talk in armies and nations and numbers - but to track it home.

Oh the innocent girl in her maiden teens knows perfectly well what everything means.

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

One sheds one's sicknesses in books - repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.

Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a great passion.

A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.

Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.

Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.

God how I hate new countries: They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like senility than anything.

God is only a great imaginative experience.

How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression.

I am in love - and, my God, it is the greatest thing that can happen to a man. I tell you, find a woman you can fall in love with. Do it. Let yourself fall in love. If you have not done so already, you are wasting your life.

I believe that a man is converted when first he hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling his hitherto unconscious self.

I can't do with mountains at close quarters - they are always in the way, and they are so stupid, never moving and never doing anything but obtrude themselves.

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.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.

I shall always be a priest of love.

I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps.

It is so much more difficult to live with one's body than with one's soul. One's body is so much more exacting: what it won't have it won't have, and nothing can make bitter into sweet.

Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.

My whole working philosophy is that the only stable happiness for mankind is that it shall live married in blessed union to woman-kind - intimacy, physical and psychical between a man and his wife. I wish to add that my state of bliss is by no means perfect.

Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!

Having achieved and accomplished love... man... has become himself, his tale is told.

The proper study of mankind is man in his relation to his deity.

They say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates.

The soul is a very perfect judge of her own motions, if your mind doesn't dictate to her.

One never can know the whys and the wherefores of one's passional changes.

Men always do leave off really thinking, when the last bit of wild animal dies in them.

All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.

So long as you don't feel life's paltry and a miserable business, the rest doesn't matter, happiness or unhappiness.

Nothing that comes from the deep, passional soul is bad, or can be bad.

There is no such thing as liberty. You only change one sort of domination for another. All we can do is to choose our master.

The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.

It is quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humor, creating him a reasonable being, yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture, and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance.

The only history is a mere question of one's struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.

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

The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.

Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer.

Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art - or almost the only stuff.

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 great mass of humanity should never learn to read or write.

The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.

The one woman who never gives herself is your free woman, who is always giving herself.

We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority.

God doesn't know things. He is things.