D.H. Lawrence

"The dead don't die. They look on and help."

"This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women. There is my creed."

"It's no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You've got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they've got to come. You can't force them."

"I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.(Letter to Cynthia Asquith, November 1913)"

"“It's no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You've got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they've got to come. You can't force them.”"

"Time went on grey, uncloured, like a long journey where she sat unconscious as the landscape unrolled beside her."

"The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble."

"A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it."

"Gods should be iridescent, like the rainbow in the storm. Man creates a God in his own image, and the gods grow old along with the men that made them... But the god-stuff roars eternally, like the sea, with too vast a sound to be heard."

"Sometimes a high moon, liquid-brilliant, scudded across a hollow space and took cover under electric, brown-iridescent cloud-edges."

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

"Sleep seems to hammer out for me the logical conclusions of my vague days, and offer them to me as dreams."

"Oh build your ship of death, oh build it in time and build it lovingly, and put it between the hands of your soul."

"He felt if he could not be alone, and if he could not be left alone, he would die."

"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 analysing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon."

"The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it."

"And they fear nothing, and they respect nothing, the young don't."

"Only youth has a taste of immortality."

"So, after three days of incessant brandy-drinking, he had burned out the youth from his blood, he had achieved this kindled state of oneness with all the world, which is the end of youth's most passionate desire."

"I WANT her though, to take the same from me. She touches me as if I were herself, her own. She has not realized yet, that fearful thing, that I am the other,she thinks we are all of one piece. It is painfully untrue. I want her to touch me at last, ah, on the root andquick of my darknessand perish on me, as I have perished on her. Then, we shall be two and distinct, we shall haveeach our separate being. And that will be pure existence, real liberty. Till then, we are confused, a mixture, unresolved,unextricated one from the other. It is in pure, unutterable resolvedness, distinctionof being, that one is free,not in mixing, merging, not in similarity. When she has put her hand on my secret, darkestsources, the darkest outgoings,when it has struck home to her, like a death, "this is _him!_"she has no part in it, no part whatever,it is the terrible _other_,when she knows the fearful _other flesh_, ah, dark-ness unfathomable and fearful, contiguous and concrete,when she is slain against me, and lies in a heaplike one outside the house,when she passes away as I have passed awaybeing pressed up against the _other_,then I shall be glad, I shall not be confused with her,I shall be cleared, distinct, single as if burnished in silver,having no adherence, no adhesion anywhere,one clear, burnished, isolated being, unique,and she also, pure, isolated, complete,two of us, unutterably distinguished, and in unutterable conjunction. Then we shall be free, freer than angels, ah, perfect. VIIIAFTER that, there will only remain that all mendetach themselves and become unique,that we are all detached, moving in freedom morethan the angels,conditioned only by our own pure single being,having no laws but the laws of our own being. Every human being will then be like a flower, untrammelled. Every movement will be direct. Only to be will be such delight, we cover our faceswhen we think of itlest our faces betray us to some untimely fiend. Every man himself, and therefore, a surpassingsingleness of mankind. The blazing tiger will spring upon the deer, un-dimmed,the hen will nestle over her chickens,we shall love, we shall hate,but it will be like music, sheer utterance,issuing straight out of the unknown,the lightning and the rainbow appearing in usunbidden, unchecked,like ambassadors. We shall not look before and after. We shall _be_, _now_. We shall know in full. We, the mystic NOW.(From the poem the Manifesto)"