“Life is only bearable when the mind and the body are in harmony, and there is a natural balance between them, and each has a natural respect for the other.” – D. H. Lawrence, “À Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover”
Month: November 2020
“Money poisons you when you’ve got it, and starves you when you haven’t.” – D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
“Nobody knows what should be done, in spite of all the talk. The young ones get mad because they’ve no money to spend. Their whole life depends on spending money, and now they’ve got none to spend. That’s our civilisation and our education: bring up the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money gives out.” – D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
“Sex is really only touch, the closest of all touch. And it’s touch we’re afraid of. We’re only half-conscious, and half alive. We’ve got to come alive and aware.” – D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
“I believe in being warm-hearted. I believe especially in being warm-hearted in love, in fucking with a warm heart. . . . It’s all this cold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy.” – D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
“It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore, the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening.” – D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (emphasis in original)
“Civilised society is insane. Money and so-called love are its two great manias; money a long way first.” – D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
“The physical sense of injustice is a dangerous feeling, once it is awakened. It must have outlet, or it eats away the one in whom it is aroused.” – D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
“What a frail, easily hurt, rather pathetic thing a human body is, naked; somehow a little unfinished, incomplete!” – D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
“Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to about the same thing.” – D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
“I believe in having a good heart, a chirpy penis, a lively intelligence, and the courage to say ‘shit!’ in front of a lady.” – D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
“The life of the mind needs a comfortable house and decent cooking.” – D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
“The truly moral thing to do during a raging financial inferno is to put it out.” – Timothy Geithner, United States Treasury Secretary (quoted in The Economist, October 14th, 2017)
“In one’s dealings with the young it behoves one to display the scientific spirit, to exhibit the principles of enlightenment—not only for purposes of mental discipline, but on the human and individual side, in order not to wound them or indirectly offend their political sensibilities; particularly in these days, when there is so much tinder in the air, opinions are so frightfully split up and chaotic, and you may so easily incur attacks from one party or the other, or even give rise to scandal, by taking sides on a point of history.” – Thomas Mann, Disorder and Early Sorrow (trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter)
“The past is immortalized; that is to say, it is dead; and death is the root of all godliness and all abiding significance.” – Thomas Mann, Disorder and Early Sorrow (trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter)
“The capacity for self-surrender . . . for becoming a tool, for the most unconditional and utter self-abnegation, was but the reverse side of that other power to will and to command. Commanding and obeying formed together one single principle, one indissoluble unity; he who knew how to obey knew also how to command, and conversely; the one idea was comprehended in the other, as people and leader were comprehended in one another.” – Thomas Mann, Mario and the Magician (trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter)
“Freedom exists, and also the will exists, but freedom of the will does not exist, for a will that aims at its own freedom aims at the unknown.” – Thomas Mann, Mario and the Magician (trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter)
“Children are a human species and a society apart, a nation of their own, so to speak. On the basis if their common form of life, they find each other out with the greatest ease, no matter how different their small vocabularies.” – Thomas Mann, Mario and the Magician (trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter)
“If you care too much about what you have to say, if your heart is too much in it, you can be pretty sure of making a mess.” – Thomas Mann, Tonio Kröger (trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter)
“God walks out of the room when you’re thinking about money.” – Quincy Jones (quoted in AARP Bulletin, April 2018)
“Who shall unriddle the puzzle of the artist nature? Who understands that mingling of discipline and licence in which it stands so deeply rooted? For not to be able to want sobriety is licentious folly.” – Thomas Mann, Death in Venice (trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter)
“It is well for the world that it sees only the beauty of the completed work and not its origins nor the conditions whence it sprang, since knowledge of the artist’s inspiration might often but confuse and alarm and so prevent the full effect of its excellence.” – Thomas Mann, Death in Venice (trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter)
“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous—to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.” – Thomas Mann, Death in Venice (trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter)
“For an intellectual product of any value to exert an immediate influence which shall also be deep and lasting, it must rest on an inner harmony, yes, an affinity, between the personal destiny of its author and that of his contemporaries in general. Men do not know why they award fame to one work of art rather than another. Without being in the faintest connoisseurs, they think to justify the warmth of their commendations by discovering in it a hundred virtues, whereas the real ground of their applause is inexplicable—it is sympathy.” – Thomas Mann, Death in Venice (trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter)
“Marriage is what—the most pointless distance between two points?” – Gary Lutz, “Onesome”
“I thought about the sad, outcropped, lavatorial world of men. . . . Men wanted my toes in their mouth or my torso roped against a chair or my mouth lipsticked and wordless or my brain ligatured to whatever unknottable neural twist that in their own brains winched their rawing, blunted dicks into place. It was always just one thing they wanted, or could handle, at a time. . . . But I had a hard time finding anything even marginally fetishizable about a man’s life.” – Gary Lutz, “Contractions”
“A lot can happen if you stay awake.” – Gary Lutz, “People Are Already Full”
“Freud’s vision of the world had no Buchenwalds in it. Buchenwald, according to Freud, once the light was let in, would become a soccer field, fat children would learn flower-arranging and solfeggio in the strangling rooms. At Auschwitz the ovens would be converted over to petit fours and wedding cakes, and the V-2 missiles to public housing for the elves.” – Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
“All people being equally oppressed is not equality.” – Angela Ross, Facebook, June 14, 2019
“Cammed each night out of that safe furrow the bulk of this city’s waking each sunrise again set virtuously to plowing, what rich soils had he turned, what concentric planets uncovered? What voices overheard, flinders of luminescent gods glimpsed among the wallpaper’s stained foliage, candlestubs lit to rotate in the air over him, prefiguring the cigarette he or a friend must fall asleep someday smoking, thus to end among the flaming, secret salts held all those years by the insatiable stuffing of a mattress that could keep vestiges of every nightmare sweat, helplessly overflowing bladder, viciously, tearfully consummated wet dream, like the memory bank to a computer of the lost?” – Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49