Today marks the birthday of D. H. Lawrence (1885–30,) an English author of provocative novels. Lawrence was also a successful poet, playwright, and short-story writer.
Lawrence is best known for inciting strong reactions in his readers for his radical narrative of familial and marital lives and for his brazen celebration of sexual relations. For these reasons, he waged an incessant battle with the censors.
Lawrence’s most famous novels are Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920), and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). The Rainbow was accused of obscenity and Scotland Yard seized a thousand copies of the book upon its publication. Women in Love chronicles the quest of multiple women to forge new types of liberated personal relationships.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover is the most influential and notorious of Lawrence’s novels. It features a young aristocrat whose husband is paralyzed from the waist down and impotent. He encourages her to find a lover but disapproves her choice of his gamekeeper. Lady Chatterley’s Lover was banned from publication for more than 30 years because of its obscene themes and language. In 1960, a famous court case cleared the book of obscenity after 35 prominent writers and literary critics testified in its favor. When Penguin Books published 200,000 copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the book sold out within a day and most bookstores that carried the book ran out of copies within 15 minutes.
Inspirational Quotations by D. H. Lawrence
The living moment is everything.
—D. H. Lawrence (English Novelist)
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. Lawrence (English Novelist)
One doesn’t know, till one is a bit at odds with the world, how much one’s friends who believe in one rather generously, mean to one.
—D. H. Lawrence (English Novelist)
We don’t exist unless we are deeply and sensually in touch with that which can be touched but not known.
—D. H. Lawrence (English Novelist)
Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar.
—D. H. Lawrence (English Novelist)
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. Lawrence (English Novelist)
I shall always be a priest of love.
—D. H. Lawrence (English Novelist)
The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.
—D. H. Lawrence (English Novelist)
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. Lawrence (English Novelist)
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. Lawrence (English Novelist)
One sheds one’s sicknesses in books—repeats and presents again one’s emotions, to be master of them.
—D. H. Lawrence (English Novelist)
Tragedy is like strong acid—it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.
—D. H. Lawrence (English Novelist)