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The American Grips Himself, At The Very Sources Of His Consciousness, In A Grip Of Care: And Then, To So Much Of The Rest Of Life, Is Indifferent. Whereas, The European Hasn't Got So Much Care In Him, So He Cares Much More For Life And Living.

-D. H. Lawrence

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The American Grips Himself,

D. H. Lawrence

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The American Grips Himself, At The Very Sources Of His Consciousness, In A Grip Of Care: And Then, To So Much Of The Rest Of Life, Is Indifferent. Whereas, The European Hasn't Got So Much Care In Him, So He Cares Much More For Life And Living.

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And Woman Is The Same As Horses: Two Wills Act In Opposition Inside Her. With One Will She Wants To Subject Herself Utterly. With The Other She Wants To Bolt, And Pitch Her Rider To Perdition.

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Poe Tried Alcohol, And Any Drug He Could Lay His Hands On. He Also Tried Any Human Being He Could Lay His Hands On.

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The Novel Is The Highest Example Of Subtle Interrelatedness That Man Has Discovered.

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What The Eye Doesn't See And The Mind Doesn't Know, Doesn't Exist.

The Aztec Gods And Goddesses Are, As Far As We Have Known Anything About Them, An Unlovely And Unlovable Lot. In Their Myths There Is No Grace Or Charm, No Poetry. Only This Perpetual Grudge, Grudge, Grudging, One God Grudging Another, The Gods Grudging Men Their Existence, And Men Grudging The Animals. The Goddess Of Love Is Goddess Of Dirt And Prostitution, A Dirt-eater, A Horror, Without A Touch Of Tenderness.

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No Creature Is Fully Itself Till It Is, Like The Dandelion, Opened In The Bloom Of Pure Relationship To The Sun, The Entire Living Cosmos.

Thought Is A Man In His Wholeness, Wholly Attending.

When Each Thing Is Unique In Itself, There Can Be No Comparison Made.... There Is Only This Strange Recognition Of Present Otherness.

When Van Gogh Paints Sunflowers, He Reveals, Or Achieves, The Vivid Relation Between Himself, As Man, And The Sunflower, As Sunflower, At That Quick Moment Of Time. His Painting Does Not Represent The Sunflower Itself. We Shall Never Know What The Sunflower Itself Is. And The Camera Will Visualize The Sunflower Far More Perfectly Than Van Gogh Can.

To Our Senses, The Elements Are Four And Have Ever Been, And Will Ever Be For They Are The Elements Of Life, Of Poetry, And Of Perception, The Four Great Ones, The Four Roots, The First Four Of Fire And The Wet, Earth And The Wide Air Of The World. To Find The Other Many Elements, You Must Go To The Laboratory And Hunt Them Down. But The Four We Have Always With Us, They Are Our World. Or Rather, They Have Us With Them.

The World Is Wonderful And Beautiful And Good Beyond One's Wildest Imagination.

Softly, In The Dusk, A Woman Is Singing To Me; Taking Me Back Down The Vista Of Years, Till I See A Child Sitting Under The Piano, In The Boom Of The Tingling Strings And Pressing The Small, Poised Feet Of A Mother Who Smiles As She Sings.

The Dead Don't Die. They Look On And Help.

You're Spending Your Life Without Renewing It. You've Got To Be Amused, Properly Healthily Amused. You're Spending Your Vitality Without Making Any. Can't Go On You Know. Depression! Avoid Depression!

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.

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.

The Upshot Was, My Paintings Must Burn That English Artists Might Finally Learn.

Men Always Do Leave Off Really Thinking, When The Last Bit Of Wild Animal Dies In Them.

It Is Not Woman Who Claims The Highest In Man. It Is A Man's Own Religious Soul That Drives Him On Beyond Women, To His Supreme Activity. For His Highest, Man Is Responsible To God Alone.

Obscenity Only Comes In When The Mind Despises And Fears The Body, And The Body Hates And Resists The Mind.

Only In A Novel Are All Things Given Full Play.

Why Is A Door-knob Deader Than Anything Else?

Money Is The Seal And Stamp Of Success.

Money Is Our Madness, Our Vast Collective Madness.

I Am Convinced That The Majority Of People To-day Have Good, Generous Feelings Which They Can Never Know, Never Experience, Because Of Some Fear, Some Repression. I Do Not Believe That People Would Be Villains, Thieves, Murderers And Sexual Criminals If They Were Freed From Legal Restraint.

Creatures That Hang Themselves Up Like An Old Rag, To Sleep; And Disgustingly Upside Down. Hanging Upside Down Like Rows Of Disgusting Old Rags And Grinning In Their Sleep. Bats!

Why, Oh Why Must One Grow Up, Why Must One Inherit This Heavy, Numbing Responsibility Of Living An Undiscovered Life? Out Of The Nothingness And The Undifferentiated Mass, To Make Something Of Herself! But What? In The Obscurity And Pathlessness To Take A Direction! But Whither? How Take Even One Step? And Yet, How Stand Still? This Was Torment Indeed, To Inherit The Responsibility Of One’s Own Life.

One Realm We Have Never Conquered: The Pure Present.

Necessary, Forever Necessary, To Burn Out False Shames And Smelt The Heaviest Ore Of The Body Into Purity.

Unless One Decorates One's House For Oneself Alone, Best Leave It Bare, For Other People Are Walleyed.

The Elephant, The Huge Old Beast, Is Slow To Mate

Satire Exists For The Purpose Of Killing The Social Being [for The Sake Of] The True Individual, The Real Human Being.

That Was The Birth Of Sin. Not Doing It, But Knowing About It. Before The Apple, [adam And Eve] Had Shut Their Eyes And Their Minds Had Gone Dark. Now, They Peeped And Pried And Imagined. They Watched Themselves.

[man's] Life Consists In A Relation With All Things: Stone, Earth, Trees, Flowers, Water, Insects, Fishes, Birds, Creatures, Sun,rainbow, Children, Women, Other Men. But His Greatest And Final Relation Is With The Sun.

I Should Think The American Admiration Of Five-minute Tourists Has Done More To Kill The Sacredness Of Old European Beauty And Aspiration Than Multitudes Of Bombs Would Have Done.

A House O' Women Is As Dead As A House Wi' No Fire, To My Thinkin'. I'm Not A Spider As Likes To Corner Myself. I Like A Man About, If He's Only Something To Snap At.

It Was As If Thousands And Thousands Of Little Roots And Threads Of Consciousness In Him And Her Had Grown Together Into A Tangled Mass, Till They Could Crowd No More, And The Plant Was Dying. Now Quietly, Subtly, She Was Unravelling The Tangle Of His Consciousness And Hers, Breaking The Threads Gently, One By One, With Patience And Impatience To Get Clear.

I Am Not A Mechanism, An Assembly Of Various Sections. And It Is Not Because The Mechanism Is Working Wrongly, That I Am Ill. I Am Ill Because Of Wounds To The Soul, To The Deep Emotional Self, And The Wounds To The Soul Take A Long, Long Time, Only Time Can Help And Patience, And A Certain Difficult Repentance Long Difficult Repentance, Realization Of Life’s Mistake, And The Freeing Oneself From The Endless Repetition Of The Mistake Which Mankind At Large Has Chosen To Sanctify.

It's Not Art For Art's Sake, It's Art For My Sake.

How I Hate The Attitude Of Ordinary People To Life. How I Loathe Ordinariness! How From My Soul I Abhor Nice Simple People, With Their Eternal Price List. It Makes My Blood Boil.

God Doesn't Know Things. He Is Things.

Men Live In Glad Obedience To The Masters They Believe In, Or They Live In A Frictional Opposition To The Master They Wish To Undermine.

The Weakness Of Modern Tragedy[is That] Transgression Against The Social Code Is Made To Bring Destruction, As Though The Social Code Worked Our Irrevocable Fate.

If You Cut A Thing Up, Of Course It Will Smell. Hence, Nothing Raises Such An Infernal Stink At Last, As Human Psychology.

No Form Of Love Is Wrong, So Long As It Is Love, And You Yourself Honour What You Are Doing. Love Has An Extraordinary Variety Of Forms! And That Is All That There Is In Life, It Seems To Me.

Humanity Is Less, Far Less Than The Individual, Because The Individual May Sometimes Be Capable Of Truth, And Humanity Is A Tree Of Lies.

But The Act, Called The Sexual Act, Is Not For The Depositing Of Seed. It Is For Leaping Off Into The Unknown, As From A Cliff's Edge, Like Sappho Into The Sea.

Europe's The Mayonnaise All Right, But America Supplies The Good Old Lobster.

Democracy And Equality Try To Denythe Mystic Recognition Of Difference And Innate Priority, The Joy Of Obedience And The Sacred Responsibility Of Authority.

One Should Feel Inside Oneself For Right And Wrong, And Should Have The Patience To Gradually Realise One's God.

I Can Never Decide Whether My Dreams Are The Result Of My Thoughts, Or My Thoughts The Result Of My Dreams.

We Must Know, If Only In Order To Learn Not To Know. The Supreme Lesson Of Human Consciousness Is To Learn How Not To Know. That Is, How Not To Interfere.

The Living Self Has One Purpose Only: To Come Into Its Own Fullness Of Being, As A Tree Comes Into Full Blossom, Or A Bird Into Spring Beauty, Or A Tiger Into Lustre.

Primarily I Am A Passionately Religious Man, And My Novels Must Be Written From The Depth Of My Religious Experience.

In Every Living Thing There Is The Desire For Love.

Melville Had To Fight, Fight Against The Existing World, Against His Own Very Self. Only He Would Never Quite Put The Knife In The Heart Of His Paradisal Ideal. Somehow, Somewhere, Somewhen, Love Should Be A Fulfillment, And Life Should Be A Thing Of Bliss. That Was His Fixed Ideal. Fata Morgana. That Was The Pin He Tortured Himself On, Like A Pinned-down Butterfly.

The Day Of The Absolute Is Over, And We're In For The Strange Gods Once More.

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?

Tragedy Looks To Me Like Man In Love With His Own Defeat. Which Is Only A Sloppy Way Of Being In Love With Yourself.

When We Get Out Of The Glass Bottles Of Our Ego, And When We Escape Like Squirrels Turning In The Cages Of Our Personality And Get Into The Forests Again, We Shall Shiver With Cold And Fright But Things Will Happen To Us So That We Don't Know Ourselves. Cool, Unlying Life Will Rush In, And Passion Will Make Our Bodies Taut With Power, We Shall Stamp Our Feet With New Power And Old Things Will Fall Down, We Shall Laugh, And Institutions Will Curl Up Like Burnt Paper.

Now It Is Autumn And The Falling Fruit And The Long Journey Towards Oblivion. The Apples Falling Like Great Drops Of Dew To Bruise Themselves An Exit From Themselves.

And Still I Look For The Men Who Will Dare To Be Roses Of England Wild Roses Of England Men Who Are Wild Roses Of England With Metal Thorns, Beware! But Still More Brave And Still More Rare The Courage Of Rosiness In A Cabbage World Fragrance Of Roses In A Stale Stink Of Lies Rose-leaves To Bewilder The Clever Fools And Rose-briars To Strangle The Machine.

So As Long As You Can Forget Your Body You Are Happy And The Moment You Begin To Be Aware Of Your Body, You Are Wretched. So If Civilization Is Any Good, It Has To Help Us Forget Our Bodies, And Then Time Passes Happily Without Our Knowing It. Help Us Get Rid Of Our Bodies Altogether.

Patience! Patience! The World Is A Vast And Ghastly Intricacy Of Mechanism, And One Has To Be Very Wary, Not To Get Mangled By It.

Can You Understand How Cruelly I Feel The Lack Of Friends Who Will Believe In Me A Bit?

You Can Have Your Cake And Eat It. But My God, It Will Go Rotten Inside You.

Away With All Ideals. Let Each Individual Act Spontaneously From The Forever Incalculable Prompting Of The Creative Wellhead Within Him. There Is No Universal Law.

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.

I Hold That The Parentheses Are By Far The Most Important Parts Of A Non-business Letter.

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.

It Is Time That The Protestant Church, The Church Of The Son, Should Be One Again With The Roman Catholic Church, The Church Of The Father. It Is Time That Man Shall Cease, First To Live In The Flesh, With Joy, And Then, Unsatisfied, To Renounce And To Mortify The Flesh.

Only This Shimmeriness Is The Real Living. The Shape Is A Dead Crust. The Shimmer Is Inside Really.

I Shall Be Glad When You Have Strangled The Invincible Respectability That Dogs Your Steps.

Consciousness Is An End In Itself. We Torture Ourselves Getting Somewhere, And When We Get There It Is Nowhere, For There Is Nowhere To Get To.

I Wonder Which Was More Frightened Among Old Tribes -- Those Bursting Out Of Their Darkness Of Woods Upon All The Space Of Light, Or Those From The Open Tiptoeing Into The Forests.

Night, In Which Everything Was Lost, Went Reaching Out, Beyond Stars And Sun. Stars And Sun, A Few Bright Grains, Went Spiraling Round For Terror, And Holding Each Other In Embrace, There In A Darkness That Outpassed Them All, And Left Them Tiny And Daunted. So Much, And Himself, Infinitesimal, At The Core Of Nothingness, And Yet Not Nothing.

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.

In The Ancient Recipe, The Three Antidotes For Dullness Or Boredom Are Sleep, Drink, And Travel. It Is Rather Feeble. From Sleep You Wake Up, From Drink You Become Sober, And From Travel You Come Home Again. And Then Where Are You? No, The Two Sovereign Remedies For Dullness Are Love Or A Crusade.

The Purest Lesson Our Era Has Taught Is That Man, At His Highest, Is An Individual, Single, Isolate, Alone, In Direct Soul-communication With The Unknown God, Which Prompts Within Him.

The Reaction To Any Word May Be, In An Individual, Either A Mob-reaction Or An Individual Reaction. It Is Up To The Individual To Ask Himself: Is My Reaction Individual, Or Am I Merely Reacting From My Mob-self? When It Comes To The So-called Obscene Words, I Should Say That Hardly One Person In A Million Escapes Mob-reaction.

This Spring As It Comes Bursts Up In Bonfires Green, Wild Puffing Of Emerald Trees, And Flame-filled Bushes, Thorn-blossom Lifting In Wreaths Of Smoke Between Where The Wood Fumes Up And The Watery, Flickering Rushes. I Am Amazed At This Spring, This Conflagration Of Green Fires Lit On The Soil Of The Earth, This Blaze Of Growing, And Sparks That Puff In Wild Gyration, Faces Of People Streaming Across My Gaze.

Literary Criticism Can Be No More Than A Reasoned Account Of The Feeling Produced Upon The Critic By The Book He Is Criticising.

One Should Stick By One's Soul, And By Nothing Else. In One's Soul, One Knows The Truth From The Untruth, And Life From Death. And If One Betrays One's Own Soul-knowledge One Is The Worst Of Traitors.

In America The Cohesion Was A Matter Of Choice And Will. But In Europe It Was Organic.

Their Whole Life Depends On Spending Money, And Now They’ve Got None To Spend. That’s Our Civilization And Our Education: Bring Up The Masses To Depend Entirely On Spending Money, And Then The Money Gives Out.

The Old Ideals Are Dead As Nails--nothing There. It Seems To Me There Remains Only This Perfect Union With A Woman--sort Of Ultimate Marriage--and There Isn't Anything Else.

Beauty Is A Mystery. You Can Neither Eat It Nor Make Flannel Out Of It.

Once You Abstract From This, Once You Generalize And Postulate Universals, You Have Departed From The Creative Reality, And Entered The Realm Of Static Fixity, Mechanism, Materialism.

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.

I'd Be Ashamed To See A Woman Walking Around With My Name-label On Her, Address And Railway Station, Like A Wardrobe Trunk.

There Is A Brief Time For Sex, And A Long Time When Sex Is Out Of Place. But When It Is Out Of Place As An Activity There Still Should Be The Large And Quiet Space In The Consciousness Where It Lives Quiescent. Old People Can Have A Lovely Quiescent Sort Of Sex, Like Apples, Leaving The Young Quite Free For Their Sort.

Paris Was Sad. One Of The Saddest Towns: Weary Of Its Now-mechanical Sensuality, Weary Of The Tension Of Money, Money, Money, Weary Even Of Resentment And Conceit, Just Weary To Death, And Still Not Sufficiently Americanized Or Londonized To Hide The Weariness Under A Mechanical Jig-jig-jig!

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.

They Say The Sea Is Cold, But The Sea Contains The Hottest Blood Of All, And The Wildest, The Most Urgent.

The Whole Question Of Pornography Seems To Me A Question Of Secrecy. Without Secrecy There Would Be No Pornography. But Secrecy And Modesty Are Two Utterly Different Things. Secrecy Has Always An Element Of Fear In It, Amounting Very Often To Hate. Modesty Is Gentle And Reserved. Today, Modesty Is Thrown To The Winds, Even In The Presence Of The Grey Guardians. But Secrecy Is Hugged, Being A Vice In Itself. And The Attitude Of The Grey Ones Is: Dear Young Ladies, You May Abandon All Modesty, So Long As You Hug Your Dirty Little Secret.

And Every True Artist Is The Salvation Of Every Other. But Only Artists Produce For Each Other The World That Is Fit To Live In.

It Is Our Business To Go As We Are Impelled.

Whatever Men You Take, Keep The Idea Of Man Intact: Let Your Soul Wait Whether Your Body Does Or Not.

All Vital Truth Contains The Memory Of All That For Which It Is Not True.

I See A Redness Suddenly Come Into The Evening's Anxious Breast-- 'tis The Wound Of Love Goes Home!

Let Yourself Fall In Love. If You Have Not Done So Already, You Are Wasting Your Life.

Falling In Love

Morality Which Is Based On Ideas, Or On An Ideal, Is An Unmitigated Evil.

Not I, Not I, But The Wind That Blows Through Me! A Fine Wind Is Blowing The New Direction Of Time.

Where Is The Source Of All Money-sickness, And The Origin Of All Sex-perversion?.... It Lies In The Heart Of Man, And Not In The Conditions.

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