The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations Preface

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ (1928) ch. 1
John Thomas says good-night to Lady Jane, a little droopingly, but with a hopeful heart.
‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ (1928) ch. 19
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.
‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ (1928) ch. 9
The English...are paralysed by fear. That is what thwarts and distorts the Anglo-Saxon
existence. It...seemed to dig in to the English soul at the time of the Renaissance. Nothing could
be more lovely and fearless than Chaucer. But already Shakespeare is morbid with fear, fear of
consequences. That is the strange phenomenon of the English Renaissance: this mystic terror of
the consequences, the consequences of action.
‘Phoenix’ (1936) ‘An Introduction to these Paintings’
If you try to nail anything down in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and
walks away with the nail.
‘Phoenix’ (1936) ‘Morality and the Novel’
Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it.
‘Phoenix’ (1936) ‘Pornography and Obscenity’ ch. 3
In life...no new thing has ever arisen, or can arise, save out of the impulse of the male upon the
female, the female upon the male. The interaction of the male and female spirit begot the wheel,
the plough, and the first utterance that was made on the face of the earth.
‘Phoenix’ (1936) ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ ch. 7
The novel is the one bright book of life.
‘Phoenix’ (1936) ‘Why the novel matters’
Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the
artist who created it.
‘Studies in Classic American Literature’ (1923) ch. 1
Be a good animal, true to your instincts.
‘The White Peacock’ (1911) pt. 2, ch. 2
Don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass,
and a hare sitting up?
‘Women in Love’ (1920) ch. 11
The Forsytes are all parasites...parasites upon the thoughts, the feelings, the whole body of life
of really living individuals who have gone before them and who live alongside them. All they can
do, having no individual life of their own, is out of fear to rake together property.
xxx
Is it the secret of the long-nosed Etruscans?
The long-nosed, sensitive-footed, subtly-smiling Etruscans
Who made so little noise outside the cypress groves?