R.J. Lawrence Quotes

I will wait and watch till the day of David at last shall be finished, and wisdom no more fox-faced, and the blood gets back its flame.

Truth does not lie beyond humanity, but is one of the products of the human mind and feeling.

No form of love is wrong, so long as it is love.

It is no good casting out devils. They belong to us, we must accept them and be at peace with them.

You can have your cake and eat it. But my God, it will go rotten inside you.

I know the greatness of Christianity; it is a past greatness.. I live in 1924, and the Christian venture is done.

Primarily I am a passionately religious man, and my novels must be written from the depth of my religious experience.

The real tragedy of England, as I see it, is the tragedy of ugliness. The country is so lovely: the man-made England is so vile.

At a wavering instant the swallows gave way to bats By the Ponte Vecchio . . . Changing guard.

Anatomy presupposes a corpse; psychology presupposes a world of corpses.

How ravished one could be without ever being touched. Ravished by dead words become obscene and dead ideas become obsessions.

I want the wonder back again, or I shall die.

There is nothing to save, now all is lost, but a tiny core of stillness in the heart like the eye of a violet.

He always ran away from the battle with himself. Even in his own heart's privacy, he excused himself, saying, "If she hadn't said so-and-so, it would never have happened.

We are dying, we are dying, we are all of us dying and nothing will stay the death-flood rising within us and soon it will rise on the world, on the outside world.

The goal is to know how not-to-know.

I love you, rotten, Delicious rottenness. ...wonderful are the hellish experiences, Orphic, delicate Dionysos of the Underworld.

She had borne so long the cruelty of belonging to him and not being claimed by him.

Mankind has got to get back to the rhythm of the cosmos.

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.

Shall I tell you what you have that other men don't?.... It's the courage of your own tenderness.

It's terrible, once you've got a man into your blood!" she said.

Any novel of importance has a purpose. If only the "purpose" be large enough, and not at outs with the passional inspiration.

In every great novel, who is the hero all the time? Not any of the characters, but some unnamed and nameless flame behind them all.

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

You have to have something vicious in you to be a creative writersomething old-adamish, incompatible to the "ordinary world.

He felt he had lost it for good, he knew what it was to have been in communication with her, and to be cast off again. In misery, his heart like a heavy stone, he went about unliving.

She knew that the horse, born to serve nobly, had waited in vain for someone noble to serve. His spirit knew that nobility had gone out of men.

Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their father's house in Beldover, working and talking.

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.

Nobody can have the soul of me. My mother has had, and nobody can have it again. Nobody can come into my very self again, and breathe me like an atmosphere.

That is almost the whole of Russian literature: the phenomenal coruscations of the souls of quite commonplace people.

An illusion which is a real experience is worth having.

You're always begging things to love you," he said, "as if you were a beggar for love. Even the flowers, you have to fawn on them--

A young man is afraid of his demon and puts his hand over the demon's mouth sometimes and speaks for him. And the things the young man says are very rarely poetry.

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.

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 tiny fish enjoy themselves in the sea.

The English people on the whole are surely the nicest people in the world, and everybody makes everything so easy for everyone else, that there is almost nothing to resist at all.

Brave people add up to an aristocracy. The democracy of thou-shalt-not is bound to be a collection of weak men.

The Brangwens had lived for generations on the Marsh Farm, in the meadows where the Erewash twisted sluggishly through alder trees, separating Derbyshire from Nottinghamshire.

To every man who struggles with his own soul in mystery, a book that is a book flowers once, and seeds, and is gone.

What is the knocking? What is the knocking at the door in the night? It is somebody who wants to do us harm. No, no, it is the three strange angels. Admit them, admit them.

The flood subsides, and the body, like a worn sea-shell emerges strange and lovely.

And can a man his own quietus make with a bare bodkin?

Marriage is the clue to human life, but there is no marriage apart from the wheeling sun and the nodding earth, from the strayingof the planets and the magnificence of the fixed stars.

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.

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

I do esteem individual liberty above everything.

Only in a novel are all things given full play.