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The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters - not to talk in armies and nations and numbers - but to track it home.
D. H. Lawrence
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Artists have the responsibility to illustrate the personal impact of war rather than just its grand scale.

D.H. Lawrence emphasizes that artists should focus on the human experiences and emotions affected by war, rather than merely discussing the statistics or the broad societal implications. By honing in on the individual stories of fighters, art can convey the profound personal toll that war takes on people, fostering a deeper understanding and connection to their struggles.

Themes

WarArtHuman ExperienceIndividualEmotions

In practice

Example use cases

In a speech about the effects of war on society.

More from D. H. Lawrence

God how I hate new countries: They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like senility than anything.
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A young man is afraid of his demon and puts his hand over the demon's mouth sometimes and speaks for him. And the things the young man says are very rarely poetry.
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And besides, look at elder flowers and bluebells-they are a sign that pure creation takes place - even the butterfly. But humanity never gets beyond the caterpillar stage -it rots in the chrysalis, it never will have wings.It is anti-creation, like monkeys and baboons.
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The Christian fear of the pagan outlook has damaged the whole consciousness of man.
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The cosmos is a vast living body, of which we are still parts. The sun is a great heart whose tremors run through our smallest veins. The moon is a great nerve center from which we quiver forever. Who knows the power that Saturn has over us, or Venus? But it is a vital power, rippling exquisitely through us all the time.
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... he preferred his own madness, to the regular sanity. He rejoiced in his own madness, he was free. He did not want that old sanity of the world, which was become so repulsive. He rejoiced in the new-found world of his madness. It was so fresh and delicate and so satisfying.
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