Never was an age more sentimental, more devoid of real feeling, more exaggerated in false feeling, than our own.
D. H. LawrenceLiterary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticising.
D. H. LawrenceSometimes snakes canโt slough. They canโt burst their old skin. Then they go sick and die inside the old skin, and nobody ever sees the new pattern. It needs a real desperate recklessness to burst your old skin at last. You simply donโt care what happens to you, if you rip yourself in two, so long as you do get out.
D. H. LawrenceMr Hemingway does it extremely well. Nothing matters. Everything happens. One wants to keep oneself loose. Avoid one thing only: gettng connected up. Don't get connected up. If you get held by anything, break it. Don't be held. Break it, and get away. Don't get away with the idea of getting somewhere else. Just get away, for the sake of getting away. Beat it! "Well, boy, I guess I'll beat it." Ah, the pleasure in saying that
D. H. LawrenceMuseums, 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. Lawrence