"Only in a novel are all things given full play"
About this Quote
Lawrence is smuggling a manifesto into a simple sentence: the novel is the one art form big enough to let life stay messy without apologizing for it. “Full play” sounds benign, almost childlike, but it carries his core suspicion of any system that trims experience down to a thesis. Poems can crystallize, sermons can moralize, essays can argue, plays must move on a stage with limits. The novel, at least in Lawrence’s ideal, can hold contradiction in both hands and refuse to choose.
The subtext is a jab at the modern world’s appetite for reduction. Early 20th-century Britain was busy with categories that promised order: industrial efficiency, social respectability, scientific rationalism, tidy moral codes. Lawrence wrote against that grain, insisting that the body, desire, class friction, tenderness, ugliness, and spirituality all belong in the same room. “Only” is the provocation. He isn’t just praising fiction; he’s claiming the novel is a rare refuge from the pressure to be legible.
Context matters because Lawrence’s own novels were routinely treated as problems to be solved - obscenity trials, scandal, the demand to separate “art” from sex or politics from feeling. His line argues that the novel’s real power is not plot but permission: the capacity to let competing truths coexist long enough to feel real. In Lawrence’s hands, that becomes an ethic. A good novel doesn’t deliver a verdict; it stages the entire argument of being alive.
The subtext is a jab at the modern world’s appetite for reduction. Early 20th-century Britain was busy with categories that promised order: industrial efficiency, social respectability, scientific rationalism, tidy moral codes. Lawrence wrote against that grain, insisting that the body, desire, class friction, tenderness, ugliness, and spirituality all belong in the same room. “Only” is the provocation. He isn’t just praising fiction; he’s claiming the novel is a rare refuge from the pressure to be legible.
Context matters because Lawrence’s own novels were routinely treated as problems to be solved - obscenity trials, scandal, the demand to separate “art” from sex or politics from feeling. His line argues that the novel’s real power is not plot but permission: the capacity to let competing truths coexist long enough to feel real. In Lawrence’s hands, that becomes an ethic. A good novel doesn’t deliver a verdict; it stages the entire argument of being alive.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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