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America
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America is neither free nor brave, but a land of tight, iron-clanking little wills, everybody trying to put it over everybody else, and a land of men absolutely devoid of the real courage of trust, trust in life's sacred spontaneity. They can't trust life until they can control it.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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America does to me what I knew it would do: it just bumps me. The people charge at you like trucks coming down on you -- no awareness. But one tries to dodge aside in time. Bump! bump! go the trucks. And that is human contact.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Animals
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Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Astrology
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We need not feel ashamed of flirting with the zodiac. The zodiac is well worth flirting with.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Authors & Writing
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Books
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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!
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Bread
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The peasants of Sicily, who have kept their own wheat and made their own bread, ah, it is amazing how fresh and sweet and clean their loafs seem,so perfumes, as home-made bread used to be before the war.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Censorship
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The upshot was, my paintings must burn that English artists might finally learn.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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City Life, Cities
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Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Civilization
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Every new stroke of civilization has cost the lives of countless brave men, who have fallen defeated by the dragon, in their efforts to win the apples of the Hesperides, or the fleece of gold. Fallen in their efforts to overcome the old, half sordid savagery of the lower stages of creation, and win the next stage.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Confusion
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Try to find your deepest issue in every confusion, and abide by that.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence, Selected Essays
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Conversation
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Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Corruption
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Every civilization when it loses its inner vision and its cleaner energy, falls into a new sort of sordidness, more vast and more stupendous than the old savage sort. An Augean stable of metallic filth.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Criticism
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Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Democracy
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You must drop all your democracy. You must not believe in the people. One class is no better than another. It must be a case of Wisdom, or Truth. Let the working classes be working classes. That is the truth. There must be an aristocracy of people who have wisdom, and there must be a Ruler: a Kaiser: no Presidents and democracies.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Design
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Education
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They were evidently small men, all wind and quibbles, flinging out their chuffy grain to us with far less interest than a farm-wife feels as she scatters corn to her fowls.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Effort
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But the effort, the effort! And as the marrow is eaten out of a man's bones and the soul out of his belly, contending with the strange rapacity of savage life, the lower stage of creation, he cannot make the effort any more.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Endurance
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Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Equality
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The deadly Hydra now is the hydra of Equality. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity is the three-fanged serpent.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Ethics
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Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Evil
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This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Exile
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We make a mistake forsaking England and moving out into the periphery of life. After all, Taormina, Ceylon, Africa, America -- as far as we go, they are only the negation of what we ourselves stand for and are: and we're rather like Jonahs running away from the place we belong.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Flowers
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The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Freedom
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Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Generations
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We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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God
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God is only a great imaginative experience.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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I cannot be a materialist -- but Oh, how is it possible that a God who speaks to all hearts can let Belgravia go laughing to a vicious luxury, and Whitechapel cursing to a filthy debauchery -- such suffering, such dreadful suffering -- and shall the short years of Christ's mission atone for it all?
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Gossip
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Never trust the teller, trust the tale.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Horses, Horse Racing
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You were a lord if you had a horse...
Far back, far back in our dark soul the horse prances. . . . The horse, the horse! The symbol of surging potency and power of movement, of action, in man.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence, 1931
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Humanity
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The world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can't wake up.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Identity
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I don't like your miserable lonely single front name. It is so limited, so meager; it has no versatility; it is weighted down with the sense of responsibility; it is worn threadbare with much use; it is as bad as having only one jacket and one hat; it is like having only one relation, one blood relation, in the world. Never set a child afloat on the flat sea of life with only one sail to catch the wind.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Individuality
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Only at his maximum does an individual surpass all his derivative elements, and become purely himself. And most people never get there. In his own pure individuality a man surpasses his father and mother, and is utterly unknown to them.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Insects
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That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic: invisibility, and the anaesthetic power to deaden my attention in your direction.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Intelligence
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My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Intuition
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The mind can assert anything and pretend it has proved it. My beliefs I test on my body, on my intuitional consciousness, and when I get a response there, then I accept.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Kindness
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It is all a question of sensitiveness. Brute force and overbearing may make a terrific effect. But in the end, that which lives by delicate sensitiveness. If it were a question of brute force, not a single human baby would survive for a fortnight. It is the grass of the field, most frail of all things, that supports all life all the time. But for the green grass, no empire would rise, no man would eat bread: for grain is grass; and Hercules or Napoleon or Henry Ford would alike be denied existence.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Letters (writing)
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I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Life
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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We only seem to learn from Life that Life doesn't matter so much as it seemed to do -- it's not so burningly important, after all, what happens. We crawl, like blinking sea-creatures, out of the Ocean onto a spur of rock, we creep over the promontory bewildered and dazzled and hurting ourselves, then we drop in the ocean on the other side: and the little transit doesn't matter so much.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Logic
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Love
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Ah, then, upon my bedroom I do draw
The blind to hide the garden, where the moon
Enjoys the open blossoms as they straw
Their beauty for his taking, boon for boon.
And I do lift my aching arms to you,
And I do lift my anguished, avid breast,
And I do weep for very pain of you,
And fling myself at the doors of sleep, for rest.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence, A Love Song
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Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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The world is wonderful and beautiful and good beyond one's wildest imagination. Never, never, never could one conceive what love is, beforehand, never. Life can be great --quite god-like. It can be so. God be thanked I have proved it.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let live, love and let love, flower and fade, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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I shall always be a priest of love.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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My God, these folks don't know how to love -- that's why they love so easily.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Mankind, Man
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Marriage
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Maturity
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I believe a man is born first unto himself --for the happy developing of himself, while the world is a nursery, and the pretty things are to be snatched for, and pleasant things tasted; some people seem to exist thus right to the end. But most are born again on entering manhood; then they are born to humanity, to a consciousness of all the laughing, and the never-ceasing murmur of pain and sorrow that comes from the terrible multitudes of brothers.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Men
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How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Men & Women
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The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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The source of all life and knowledge is in man and woman, and the source of all living is in the interchange and the meeting and mingling of these two: man-life and woman-life, man-knowledge and woman-knowledge, man-being and woman-being.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Moon
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The moon is a white strange world, great, white, soft-seeming globe in the night sky, and what she actually communicates to me across space I shall never fully know. But the moon that pulls the tides, and the moon that controls the menstrual periods of women, and the moon that touches the lunatics, she is not the mere dead lump of the astronomist. When we describe the moon as dead, we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void, we are describing our own unbearable emptiness.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Morals
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There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Museums, Galleries
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Museums, museums, museums, object-lessons rigged out to illustrate the unsound theories of archaeologists, crazy attempts to co-ordinate and get into a fixed order that which has no fixed order and will not be co-coordinated! It is sickening! Why must all experience be systematized? A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Myths, Mythology
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Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Nation, Nationality, Nationalism
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Nature
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Opera
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I love Italian opera -- it's so reckless. Damn Wagner, and his bellowings at Fate and death. Damn Debussy, and his averted face. I like the Italians who run all on impulse, and don't care about their immortal souls, and don't worry about the ultimate.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Peace
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But then peace, peace! I am so mistrustful of it: so much afraid that it means a sort of weakness and giving in.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence, Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence
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People
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One can no longer live with people: it is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Pornography
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Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Profanity, Swearing, Vulgarity
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Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art -- or almost the only stuff.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Prostitution
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If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of a harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Psychology
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We have lost the art of living; and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life, the science of behavior, we are complete ignoramuses. We have psychology instead.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Always this same morbid interest in other people and their doings, their privacies, their dirty linen, always this air of alertness for personal happenings, personalities, personalities, personalities. Always this subtle criticism and appraisal of other people, this analysis of other people's motives. If anatomy presupposes a corpse, then psychology presupposes a world of corpses. Personalities, which means personal criticism and analysis, presuppose a whole world laboratory of human psyches waiting to be vivisected. If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink, at last, as human psychology.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Reading
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After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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One sheds one's sicknesses in books -- repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Relationships
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I want relations which are not purely personal, based on purely personal qualities; but relations based upon some unanimous accord in truth or belief, and a harmony of purpose, rather than of personality. I am weary of personality. Let us be easy and impersonal, not forever fingering over our own souls, and the souls of our acquaintances, but trying to create a new life, a new common life, a new complete tree of life from the roots that are within us.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Religion
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Respect
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I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Romance
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And what's romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything As You Like It, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose and it's always daisy-time.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Self-Pity
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Serenity
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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... 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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Sex
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Sex is the one thing you cannot really swindle; and it is the centre of the worst swindling of all, emotional swindling.... Sex lashes out against counterfeit emotion, and is ruthless, devastating against false love.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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I am sure no other civilization, not even the Romans, has showed such a vast proportion of ignominious and degraded nudity, and ugly, squalid dirty sex. Because no other civilization has driven sex into the underworld, and nudity to the W.C.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Sleep
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Sleep is still most perfect when it is shared with a beloved. The warmth, the security and peace of soul, the utter comfort from the touch of the other, knits the sleep, so that it takes the body and soul completely in its healing.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
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And if tonight my soul may find her peace
in sleep, and sink in good oblivion,
and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower
then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Society
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Why has mankind had such a craving to be imposed upon? Why this lust after imposing creeds, imposing deeds, imposing buildings, imposing language, imposing works of art? The thing becomes an imposition and a weariness at last. Give us things that are alive and flexible, which won't last too long and become an obstruction and a weariness. Even Michelangelo becomes at last a lump and a burden and a bore. It is so hard to see past him.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Style
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Thought
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The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Tragedy
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Tragedy is like strong acid -- it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Travel
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Behold then Septimus Dodge returning to Dodge-town victorious. Not crowned with laurel, it is true, but wreathed in lists of things he has seen and sucked dry. Seen and sucked dry, you know: Venus de Milo, the Rhine or the Coliseum: swallowed like so many clams, and left the shells.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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War
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Women
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The one woman who never gives herself is your free woman, who is always giving herself.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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The chief thing about a woman -- who is much of a woman -- is that in the long run she is not to be had... She is not to be caught by any of the catch-words, love, beauty, honor, duty, worth, work, salvation -- none of them -- not in the long run. In the long run she only says Am I satisfied, or is there some beastly dissatisfaction gnawing and gnawing inside me. And if there is some dissatisfaction, it is physical, at least as much as psychic, sex as much as soul.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Work
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You'll never succeed in idealizing hard work. Before you can dig mother earth you've got to take off your ideal jacket. The harder a man works, at brute labor, the thinner becomes his idealism, the darker his mind.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Books by and about D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
