D.H. Lawrence Quotes

“The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few in most personal experience. There's lots of good fish in the sea... maybe... but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you're not mackerel or herring yourself, you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.”

“Yes sir, the fish was left in place of the crystal ball. It's been bagged and tagged for analysis.”Great. Now we have another red herring on our hands.”

“Old stories sometimes slid out of her like lamp oil or light, stories containing details oblique and nearly incomprehensible to me or to anyone who has never known that world.”

“The thing about finishing a story is that finishing is really only the beginning.”

“History gives us the facts, sort of, but from literary works we can learn what the past smelled like, sounded like, and felt like, the forgotten gritty details of a lost era. Literature brings us as close as we can come to reinhabiting the past. By reclaiming this use of literature in the classroom, perhaps we can move away from the political agitation that has been our bread and butter—or porridge and hardtack—for the last 30 years.”

“The past is not another country; it is another life. The texture of daily living is different now than in the past, more different the further back we look, until we find people whose experiences created a psychology we might find baffling or rude. Many details that once made up the daily round are lost to us because people considered them too trivial to write down. Knowing the past means knowing what people carried in their pockets, what they did with their sewage, where their dogs slept. Those details may seem unimportant, but what they convey is not.”

“How like herrings and onions our vices are in the morning after we have committed them.”

“She is neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring.”

“Potential was a red herring to plot a life of wandering curiosity.”

“Damned Neuters in their Middle way of Steering Are neither Fish nor Flesh nor good Red Herring.”