A biography for D. H. Lawrencehasn’t been written yet.
“But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.”
“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.”
“Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can't invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.”
“Sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and consciousness. And the intelligence which goes with sex and beauty, and arises out of sex and beauty, is intuition.”
“The more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else.”
“The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.”
“The Moon! Artemis! the great goddess of the splendid past of men! Are you going to tell me she is a dead lump?”
“One sheds one's sicknesses in books - repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.”
“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.”
“Nothing that comes from the deep, passional soul is bad, or can be bad.”
“Oh the innocent girl in her maiden teens knows perfectly well what everything means.”
“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.”
“It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.”
“In every living thing there is the desire for love.”
“There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.”
“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.”
“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.”
“They say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates.”
“Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.”
“I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams.”