Motherhood Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence slices the romance off “genius” with a line that sounds like folk wisdom, then twists it into a warning. “They say” is doing sly work: he’s invoking the comforting, secondhand myth that brilliance is a kind of domestic success story - credit the saintly mother, file the genius under “well raised,” and feel reassured that greatness has a wholesome origin. Lawrence’s ear for social hypocrisy is sharp enough to let that reassurance hang for a beat.

Then comes the gut-punch: “They mostly have sad fates.” Not “difficult lives,” not “tragic endings,” but fates - a word that denies agency and implies inevitability. The structure is almost cruelly efficient: the first sentence offers a tidy causal explanation, the second sentence replaces causality with doom. The subtext is that we like to narrate genius as a product (of motherhood, of nurture) because it makes exceptional people legible and morally manageable. Lawrence refuses the feel-good version and insists on the cost.

Context matters: Lawrence wrote out of class tension, family conflict, illness, censorship, and a deep suspicion of industrial modernity’s spiritual anemia. His own life was marked by a powerful attachment to his mother and a chronic sense that sensitivity is punished in a society built for compliance. The line also carries a gendered sting: mothers get assigned the emotional labor of “making” greatness, then the world eats the child anyway. Lawrence isn’t praising suffering as the price of art; he’s exposing the sentimental lie that genius is simply nurtured into being - and the harsher truth that culture often turns its brightest minds into casualties.