Art & Creativity Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence treats the book as a private infirmary: you don’t write to confess, you write to recover. “Sheds” is an unsentimental verb, closer to sloughing skin than pouring out a heart. The point isn’t that art “expresses” feeling; it metabolizes it. By repeating an emotion on the page - staging it, revisiting it, giving it dialogue and weather and consequence - the writer stops being merely inhabited by it. The emotion becomes an object you can handle, edit, and, crucially, survive.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the romantic myth of the inspired sufferer. Lawrence isn’t praising illness as genius-fuel; he’s suggesting the opposite: the work is how you get the fever out of you. “Sicknesses” doesn’t have to mean literal disease. In Lawrence’s world it can be sexual anxiety, class resentment, spiritual deadness, the modern person’s habit of living at one remove from their own body. Books become a controlled re-enactment: repetition with a purpose, like exposure therapy, but aesthetically armed.

Context matters. Writing in the aftermath of Victorian moral strictures and into the mechanized, shell-shocked early 20th century, Lawrence was obsessed with what industrial modernity did to the nerves. His novels scandalized partly because they insisted that repression has symptoms. This line frames literature less as polite entertainment than as self-surgery: you cut into your own experience, not to admire the wound, but to master what would otherwise master you.