"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... Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom." ~ D. H. Lawrence
Novelist David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) was born in the village of Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, the fourth child of a poor coal miner.
Young David was a sickly child who earned a college scholarship and taught briefly before becoming an acclaimed writer with his first novel, White Peacock (1911).
"The dead don't die. They look on and help," he once wrote.
Lawrence was known for his passionate prose and insights into human nature and how women love. He celebrated self-fulfillment and the creative affirmation of life. About inspiration, he said, "Start with the sun and the rest will slowly, slowly happen."
"It's no good casting out devils," He wrote in Phoenix II (1968). "They belong to us, we must accept them and be at peace with them."
His notorious Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) was a frank and beautiful love story banned in England and the U.S. for its controversial explicitness. The novel brought him wealth and international fame and became a U.S. best-seller in 1959, the year its publication ban was lifted.
"Sex and beauty are inseparable," he explained. "Beauty is an experience, nothing else; it is not an arrangement of features...It is something to be felt, a glow or a communicated sense of fineness. Even the plainest person can look beautiful, can be beautiful."
Despite his early death from tuberculosis, Lawrence left a legacy in the exploration of the mysteries of life and said: "Even the real scientist works in the sense of wonder."
Writer's Digest TOP 100 Writers
Freedom burns within.