Studies in Classic American Literature Quotes

“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

“Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

“Democracy in America was never the same as Liberty in Europe. In Europe Liberty was a great life-throb. But in America Democracy was always something anti-life. The greatest democrats, like Abraham Lincoln, had always a sacrificial, self-murdering note in their voices. American Democracy was a form of self-murder, always. Or of murdering somebody else... The love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

“Art has two great functions. First, it provides an emotional experience. And then, if we have the courage of our own feelings, it becomes a mine of practical truth. We have had the feelings ad nauseam. But we've never dared dig the actual truth out of them, the truth that concerns us, whether it concerns our grandchildren or not.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

“The artist usually sets out -- or used to -- to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist's and the tale's. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper functions of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

“But you have there the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

“It's a queer thing is a man's soul. It is the whole of him. Which means it is the unknown him, as well as the known. It seems to me just funny, professors and Benjamins fixing the functions of the soul. Why, the soul of man is a vast forest, and all Benjamin intended was a neat back garden. And we've all got to fit into his kitchen garden scheme of things. Hail Columbia !

The soul of man is a dark forest. The Hercynian Wood that scared the Romans so, and out of which came the white- skinned hordes of the next civilization.

Who knows what will come out of the soul of man? The soul of man is a dark vast forest, with wild life in it. Think of Benjamin fencing it off!

Oh, but Benjamin fenced a little tract that he called the soul of man, and proceeded to get it into cultivation. Providence, forsooth! And they think that bit of barbed wire is going to keep us in pound for ever? More fools they.

...

Man is a moral animal. All right. I am a moral animal. And I'm going to remain such. I'm not going to be turned into a virtuous little automaton as Benjamin would have me. 'This is good, that is bad. Turn the little handle and let the good tap flow,' saith Benjamin, and all America with him. 'But first of all extirpate those savages who are always turning on the bad tap.'

I am a moral animal. But I am not a moral machine. I don't work with a little set of handles or levers. The Temperance- silence-order- resolution-frugality-industry-sincerity - justice- moderation-cleanliness-tranquillity-chastity-humility keyboard is not going to get me going. I'm really not just an automatic piano with a moral Benjamin getting tunes out of me.

Here's my creed, against Benjamin's. 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.'

'Thatgods, strange gods, come forth f rom 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. He who runs may read. He who prefers to crawl, or to go by gasoline, can call it rot.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

“For my part, life is so many things I don’t care what it is. It’s not my affair to sum it up. Just now it’s a cup of tea. This morning it was wormwood and gall. Hand me the sugar.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

“Sometimes snakes can’t slough. They can’t 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 don’t care what happens to you, if you rip yourself in two, so long as you do get out.”
― D.H. Lawrence , Studies in Classic American Literature

“The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul, angry or gentle. Anger is just, and pity is just, but judgement is never just.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

“Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

“Non fidatevi mai dell'artista. Fidatevi del racconto.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

“One wonders what the proper high-brow Romans ... read into the strange utterances of Lucretius or Apuleius or Tertullian, Augustine or Athanasius. The uncanny voice of Iberian Spain, the weirdness of old Carthage, the passion of Libya and North Africa.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

“When you are actually in America, America hurts, because it has a powerful disintegrative influence upon the white psyche. It is full of grinning, unappeased aboriginal demons, too, ghosts, and it persecutes the white men like some Eumenides, until the white men give up their absolute whiteness. America is tense with latent violence and resistance. The very common-sense of white Americans has a tinge of helplessness in it, and deep fear of what might be if they were not common-sensical.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature by D. H. Lawrence: Literary Critique and Analysis of American Authors

“Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was. Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. The moment you can do just what you like, there is nothing you care about doing. Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature by D. H. Lawrence: Literary Critique and Analysis of American Authors

“We like to think of the old-fashioned American classics as children's books. Just childishness, on our part.

The old American art-speech contains an alien quality, which belongs to the American continent and to nowhere else. But, of course, so long as we insist on reading the books as children's tales, we miss all that.

One wonders what the proper high-brow Romans of the third and fourth or later centuries read into the strange utterances of Lucretius or Apuleius or Tertullian, Augustine or Athanasius. The uncanny voice of Iberian Spain, the weirdness of old Carthage, the passion of Libya and North Africa; you may bet the proper old Romans never heard these at all. They read old Latin inference over the top of it, as we read old European inference over the top of Poe or Hawthorne.

It is hard to hear a new voice, as hard as it is to listen to an unknown language. We just don't listen. There is a new voice in the old American classics. The world has declined to hear it, and has blabbed about children's stories.

Why?—Out of fear. The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences. And it is like trying to use muscles that have perhaps never been used, or that have been going stiff for ages. It hurts horribly.

The world doesn't fear a new idea. It can pigeon-hole any idea. But it can't pigeon-hole a real new experience. It can only dodge. The world is a great dodger, and the Americans the greatest. Because they dodge their own very selves.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

“The American landscape has never been at one with the white man. Never. And white men have probably never felt so bitter anywhere, as here in America, where the very landscape, in its very beauty, seems a bit devilish and grinning, opposed to us.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature by D. H. Lawrence: Literary Critique and Analysis of American Authors

“Because, when one comes to America, one finds that there is always a certain slightly devilish resistance in the American landscape, and a certain slightly bitter resistance in the white man’s heart. Hawthorne gives this. But Cooper glosses it over.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature by D. H. Lawrence: Literary Critique and Analysis of American Authors

“Democracy in America was never the same as Liberty in Europe. In Europe Liberty was a great life-throb. But in America Democracy was always something anti-life. The greatest democrats, like Abraham Lincoln, had always a sacrificial, self-murdering note in their voices. American Democracy was a form of self-murder, always. Or of murdering somebody else.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature by D. H. Lawrence: Literary Critique and Analysis of American Authors

“To open out a new wide area of consciousness means to slough the old consciousness. The old consciousness has become a tight-fitting prison to us, in which we are going rotten.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature by D. H. Lawrence: Literary Critique and Analysis of American Authors

“It seems there can be no fusion in the flesh. But the spirit can change. The white man’s spirit can never become as the red man’s spirit. It doesn’t want to. But it can cease to be the opposite and the negative of the red man’s spirit. It can open out a new great area of consciousness, in which there is room for the red spirit too.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature by D. H. Lawrence: Literary Critique and Analysis of American Authors

“The red life flows in a different direction from the white life. You can’t make two streams that flow in opposite directions meet and mingle soothingly.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature by D. H. Lawrence: Literary Critique and Analysis of American Authors

“The Red Man and the White Man are not blood-brothers: even when they are most friendly. When they are most friendly, it is as a rule the one betraying his race-spirit to the other.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature by D. H. Lawrence: Literary Critique and Analysis of American Authors

“Damn all ideas and all ideals. Damn all the false stress, and the pins. I am I. Here am I. Where are you? Ah, there you are! Now, damn the consequences, we have met. That’s my idea of democracy, if you can call it an idea.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature by D. H. Lawrence: Literary Critique and Analysis of American Authors

“If only people would meet in their very selves, without wanting to put some idea over one another, or some ideal.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature by D. H. Lawrence: Literary Critique and Analysis of American Authors

“When I meet another man, and he is just himself—even if he is an ignorant Mexican pitted with small-pox—then there is no question between us of superiority or inferiority. He is a man and I am a man. We are ourselves. There is no question between us.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature by D. H. Lawrence: Literary Critique and Analysis of American Authors

“The bulk of the white people who live in contact with the Indian to-day would like to see this Red brother exterminated; not only for the sake of grabbing his land, but because of the silent, invisible, but deadly hostility between the spirit of the two races. The minority of whites intellectualize the Red Man and laud him to the skies. But this minority of whites is mostly a high-brow minority with a big grouch against its own whiteness. So there you are.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature by D. H. Lawrence: Literary Critique and Analysis of American Authors

“You can idealize or intellectualize. Or, on the contrary, you can let the dark soul in you see for itself. An artist usually intellectualizes on top, and his dark under-consciousness goes on contradicting him beneath. This is almost laughably the case with most American artists.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature by D. H. Lawrence: Literary Critique and Analysis of American Authors

“This Nature-sweet-and-pure business is only another effort at intellectualizing. Just an attempt to make all nature succumb to a few laws of the human mind.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature by D. H. Lawrence: Literary Critique and Analysis of American Authors

“And this is all the God the grandsons of the Pilgrim Fathers had left. Aloft on a pillar of dollars.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature by D. H. Lawrence: Literary Critique and Analysis of American Authors