Letters = The Letters of T.E. Lawrence edited by David Garnett
Selected Letters = T.E.Lawrence: The Selected Letters edited by Malcolm Brown
TELTHB = T.E. Lawrence to his Biographers
TELBHF = T.E. Lawrence by his Friends

To Mrs. Rieder dated Nov 9, 1911 "Those few books wouldn't last me a week: though I don't make a habit of getting up in the dark. A clock is an artificial contrivance, and to regulate oneself by it is to run after one's own tail." (Letters of T.E. Lawrence Letter #42)

[Selected Letters TEL to his Mother, Sept. 1910] "...but if you can get the right book at the right time you taste joys not only bodily, physical, but spiritual also, which pass one out above and beyond one's miserable self, as it were through huge air, following the light of another man's thought. And you can never be quite the old self again. You have forgotten a little bit: or rather pushed it out with a little of the inspiration of what is immortal in someone who has gone before you."

TE to E.T. Leeds 15 Dec. 1917, "Carchemish will either be hostile (Turks will never let me in) or friendly (Arab), and after being a sort of king-maker one will not be allowed to go digging quietly again. Nuisance. However the war isn't over yet, and perhaps one needn't worry one's head too soon about it." (Letters to E.T. Leeds, pp 115-6.)

[The Mint (Penguin Books 1984)] "Reason calls the grave a gateway of peace: and instinct shuns it." (p.45)

[The Last Days of T.E.Lawrence: A Leaf In The Wind (Alpha Press 1977) by Paul Marriott & Yvonne Argent] "I had hoped the new nerves would have reformed your handwriting into legibility. God alone knows how you got into the Post Office with it(Chambers was a sorter with the Paddington branch of the London Post Office)...or did they mean you for the cryptographic department?" (Chapter 5, p.43 Letter to Jock Chambers)

[ Lawrence of Arabia: The 30th Anniversary Pictorial History (NY, Doubleday 1992) by L. Robert Morris & Lawrence Raskin] "I had not taken seriously the rumors that [Korda] meant to make a film of me, but they were persistent, so at last I asked for a meeting and explained that I was inflexibly opposed to the whole notion. [Korda] was most decent and understanding and has agreed to put it off till I die or welcome it. Is it age coming on, or what? But I loathe the notion of being celluloided. My rare visits to cinemas always deepens me in a sense of their superficial falsity [and] vulgarity....The camera seems wholly in place as journalism; but when it tries to re-create, it boobs and sets my teeth on edge. So there won't be a film of me." (p.15 Letter to Robert Graves dated 4 Feb. 1935)

[ Lawrence and the Arabs]"...This is an idiot letter, and amounts to nothing except a cry for further change, which is idiocy, for I change my abode every day, my job every two days and my language every three days, and still remain always unsatisfied. I hate being in front. I hate being in back and I don't like responsibility, and I don't obey orders." (Cairo, 15 July 1918)

[The Mint] "Well, Sergeant, specifically of course we can know nothing - unqualified - but like the rest of us, I've fenced my life with a scaffolding of more or less speculative hypotheses."

[Selected Letters Page 319 to Robin Buxton dated 4 March. 1927] "I like so much the being left alone that I tend to leave other people alone, too"

[Selected Letters Page 488 to Henry Williamson on 14 May 1934] "I'm not, I think, a lonely person; though often and generally alone..."

To Augustus John: "A friend of mine went to the Alpine Club, and said my larger one (portrait) was a conscious effort by you to show how long contact with camels had affected my face! But I explained that it wasn't my face which had been in contact with camels." [Source not known]

[Letters No. 465 to Sir Edward Elgar dated 12 October 1932] "There are fleas of all grades; and so I have felt the awkward feeling of having smaller creatures than myself admiring me. I was so sorry to put you to that awkwardness; but it was inevitable. You have had a lifetime of achievement, and I was a flash in the pan. However I'm a very happy flash, and I am continually winning moments of great enjoyment."

"Once, when we were talking of man's greed, he said, 'The fools don't realize that their possessions, in time, come to possess them.'" TELBHF Ralph H. Isham p.264

On seaplane tenders: "A memorandum to the Admiralty, which he drafted, ran as follows: 'Objections noted. Oars will be provided according to recommendation. It is submitted that this principle should be extended to the land vehicles of the R.A.F.:.." TELBHF F. Yeats-Brown p.342

In one of his last letters (to Eric Kennington) after leaving the R.A.F.: "You wonder what I am doing? Well, so do I, in truth. Day seems to dawn, sun to shine, evenings to follow, and then I sleep. What I have done, what I am going to do puzzle and bewilder me. Have you ever seen a leaf fallen from your tree in autumn and been really puzzled about it? That's the feeling." TELBHF Ronald Storrs p.154

In a letter to Liddell Hart: "(P.S.) If I print 'Burn this' on the heading of every sheet of note-paper I use, will I escape the posthumous 'Life & Letters'" TELTHB Liddell Hart p.201

"You have mixed it up with an affair in Oxford St. Myself in badgeless Burberry, head-down on a dark drizzling night, being pulled up by a Lieut. Col. for not saluting him (he being accompanied by a lady, probably not his wife). I peeled off my coat, slowly. He got red in the face. I said 'You can go away.' The lady went a third way." TELTHB Liddell Hart p.94

"To explain the lure of speed you would have to explain human nature; but it is easier understood than explained. All men in all ages have beggared themselves for fast horses or camels or ships or cars or bikes or aeroplanes: all men have strained themselves dry to run or walk or swim faster. Speed is the second oldest animal craving in our nature, and our generation is fortunate in being able to indulge it more cheaply and generally than our ancestors. Evey natural man cultivates the speed that appeals to him. I have a motor-bike income." TELTHB Liddell Hart p.160

"In the R.A.F. I am in bed always at lights out: and sleep till after midnight. Then I doze, thinking more or less till reveille. At night others' minds are switched off, and that gives my thoughts longer range." TELTHB Graves p.73

"At least I should be happy if anyone found a phrase of mine worth lifting." Seven Pillars of Wisdom 1922

[Letters No. 161 to Bernard Shaw dated 17 August 1922] "I want to ask you two questions: the first one, 'Do you still read books?', doesn't require an answer. If you still go on reading I'm going to put the second question: if you don't, then please skip the two inside pages of this note and carry over to my signature at the end, and burn it all without replying. I hate letter-writing as much as I can, and so, probably do you."

[Letters No. 164 to Edward Garnett dated 26 August 1922] "It's only that my weathercock of a judgment, which would like, in secret, to believe Seven Pillars good, blows round that way whenever it finds a fair wind from someone else. "

[Letters No. 166 to Air Vice-Marshall Sir Oliver Swann 1 September 1922] "I can't ask the corporal how an aircraft hand addresses an air-vice-marshall: - so please take this letter as a work of my late existence! "

[Letters No. 205 to Lionel Curtis dated 19 March 1923] "What should the preliminaries be? A telling why I joined? As you know I don't know! Explaining it to Dawnay I said 'Mind-suicide': but that's only because I'm an incorrigible phraser. Do you, in reading my complete works, notice that tendency to do up small packets of words foppishly?"

[Letters No. 205 to Lionel Curtis dated 19 March 1923] "The Army seems safe against enthusiasm. It's a horrible life, and the other fellows fit it. I said to one 'They're the sort who instinctively throw stones at cats'... and he said 'Why what do you throw?' You perceive that I'm not yet in the picture: but I will be in time."

[Letters No. 207 to Lionel Curtis dated 14 May 1923] "When my mood gets too hot and I find myself wandering beyond control I pull out my motor-bike and hurl it top-speed through these unfit roads for hour after hour. My nerves are jaded and gone near dead, so that nothing less than hours of voluntary danger will prick them into life: and the 'life' they reach is a melancholy joy at risking something worth exactly 2/9 a day."

[Letters No. 209 to Lionel Curtis dated 27 June 1923] "...and it came upon me very hardly how excellent was their life. Fish are free of mankind you know, and are always perfectly suspended, without ache or activity of nerves, in their sheltering element."

[Letters No. 239 to Bernard Shaw dated 14 January 1924] "A Yank firm (Bone & Liverpool, or something) have pirated my Arabia Deserta preface, and are cheerful that the book is selling well in the States. It's nice to feel good enough to be stolen."

[Letters No. 243 to E.M. Forster dated 20 February 1924] "My own writing has brought me in eleven pounds since 1914."

[Letters No. 248 to E.M. Forster dated 24 September 1924] "If the flea may assert a kindred feeling with the lion... then let me suggest how my experience (& abandonment) of work in Arabia repeats your history of a situation-with-no-honest-way-out-of-it. You on the large thinking plane, me on the cluttered plane of action... and both lost."

[Letters No. 253 to R.V. Buxton dated 29 August 1924] Of Seven Pillars and George H. Doran's copyright edition... "I'd like to fix 'em at 10,000 dollars each, so that the edition would remain, unexhausted, on offer in the firm's catalogue!

[Letters No. 262 to Edward Garnett dated 9 May 1925] "My abridgment consists in cutting out every fifth word of the old text: when possible. If the fifth won't go out, the sixth probably will."

[Letters No. 271 to E. (Posh) Palmer dated 25 August 1925] "On Friday early they sent me to a doctor. He said 'Have you ever had... ... ....?' 'No sir' 'Have you ever had... ... ....?' 'No' (less confidently). 'Have you ever broken any bones?' This was my chance: I poured over him a heap of fractured fibulae, radii, metatarsals, phalanges, costes, clavicles, scapulae, till he yelled to me to stop. So I stopped, and he made clumsy efforts to write them all down."

[Letters No. 285 to E.M. Forster dated 26 April 1926] "I broke my right arm & wrist trying to start someone's car. It has been a source of discomfort since, & is not perfectly cured. In fact it's twisted a bit. No matter: but it takes away my last hope of being admitted some day to a beauty chorus." "This letter must stop. Pen-holding is a small scale business, & makes my wrist ache: and there are many letters to write. Writing is a mean snivelling business. It fails to convey anything bigger than its own scrawling miserable pot-hooks. Hoots.

[Letters No. 286 to J.G. Wilson (of J&E Bumpus: booksellers) dated 25 May 1926] "Dear Wilson, The Windsor copy will be duly sent: but I'm an old-fashioned person, to whom it seems improper that Kings should buy and sell among their subjects."

[Letters No. 290 to Dick Knowles dated 3 December 1926] "I got into a trough in the wood paving, and fell heavily, doing in the off footrest, kickstart, brake levers, 1/2 handlebar, & oil pump. Also my experienced knee-cap learnt another little trick. Alb Bennett took the wreck for £100. I limp rather picturesquely."

[Letters No. 302 to H.H. Banbury (Sgt.Maj. Royal Tank Corps) dated 20 April 1927] "The Seven Pillars is a quotation from Proverbs - 'Wisdom hath set up her seven Pillars'.

[Letters No. 309 to Sydney Cockerell dated 27 May 1927] "Your figure of 22000 for the sale of Revolt astonishes me. At 30000 the accumulated royalties will pay off the last of my debt to the bank. I will then be worth just nothing! A freedom-giving state, no doubt: but one can't very well travel comfortably on it!"

[Letters No. 312 to Eric Kennington dated 16 June 1927] "Compare us. I've tried to sculp: - failure: to write: - failure. I've made other people a lot of money: but can't bear to keep any of it for myself. I've argued myself out of creation: and go on living because it is the line of least resistance, and go on learning because the more one learns the less one knows, and some day I may attain perfect ignorance, that way. Hoots.

[Letters No. 326 to Ralph Isham dated 22 February 1927] "The recruiting Staff officer in the War Office said I must take a fresh name. I said 'What's yours?' He said 'No you don't'".

[Letters No. 327 to Edward Garnett dated 1 December 1927] "I hate bibliophiles, and did my best to throw them off the track with The S.P.; so I did not number my copies, or declare how large the edition was (the published guesses are wide of the truth) or have a standard binding, or signatures, or index, or anything posh. It is heavy, so as to be little carried about. Its type is too large for my taste, but the Lanston* people hadn't a decent point in 1923. It is grangerised of course. I said why, in my preface to the Illustrations. Why shouldn't I grangerise my own book? I bowdlerised it too." * Lanston Monotype Corp.

[Letters No. 330 to William Rothenstein dated 12 August 1927] On Gertrude Bell's Letters: "Miss Gertrude Bell's Letters came to me: they are very good - but so on the surface as to be impalpably unsatisfying. Only twice did I feel that she had got actually down to anything. She was born too gifted perhaps."

[Letters No. 335 to H.S. Ede dated 20 January 1928] "Of course your view of death is right, and all that: but it will not save you from a sense of loss when someone you like goes. I had (and perhaps still have) a hedge full of trees: they are old: and whenever one falls I miss something of what used to be the shapeliness of that hedge."

[Letters No. 341 to Colonel A.P. Wavell dated 9 February 1928] On The Palestine Campaigns by Col. A.P. Wavell: "Dear Wavell, I am reading your book, and liking it very much. My first vanity, when I got it, was to look myself up in the index!"

[Letters No. 355 to A.W. Lawrence dated 2 May 1928] "I will not publish these notes (whose present name is The Mint) in my day. And I hope that you will not (without the permission of the Chief of Staff of the R.A.F. for the time being) publish them, if the option is yours, before 1950. They are very obscene."

[Letters No. 362 to Jonathan Cape dated 30 June 1928] "They say you had five of the six best-selling books of last year. You've made your own firm, out of nothing at all, in just a very few years: and must be very proud of it: for it has a character, as well as a credit balance. Your books are the most workmanlike in London."

[Letters No. 365 to E.M. Forster dated 28 August 1928] "I suppose mothers & fathers make secret fools of themselves, over their children, in the way I do over my books. I can see what ungainly, silly things they are: yet I can't help felling happy & warm, in the hollow place between my ribs & my navel, whenever somebody, even a futile somebody, speaks well of them."

[Letters No. 366 to E.M. Forster dated 12 December 1928] "Did I tell you I'm making the 25th (rotten) translation of the Odyssey in to English? They offered me £800 to do it,* and I fell for the cash, & do not yet regret it, though it is an impossible job to do well, and a heart-breaking job to botch. However botched it certainly is." *anonymously

[Letters No. 400 to W.H. Brook dated 8 January 1930] "Don't believe more than 1/8 of any yarn you hear of me: or 1/16 if it is printed. I never do."

[Letters No. 401 to H.G. Hayter dated 8 January 1930] "...to how many people should I write? about 13426897438, I think. To how many will I write - perhaps 6 or 7. Alas. I am a miserable sinner."

[Letters No. 403 to Lady Astor dated 19 January 1930] "I haven't got a heart: only the former site of one, with a monument there to say that it has been removed and the area it occupied turned into a public garden, in pursuance of the slum-clearance scheme."

[Letters No. 432 to Bruce Rogers dated 31 January 1931] "Forgive the typewriter: I write in office hours, and they mistake the yapping of this machine for my work."

[Letters No. 480 to Robert Graves dated 24 January 1933] "Come of it, R.G.! Your letter forgets my present [state]. It is so long since we met that you are excused know that I'm now a fitter, very keen and tolerably skilled on engines, but in no way abstract. I live all of every day with real people, and concern myself only in the concrete. The ancient self- seeking, and self-devouring T.E.L. of Oxford (and T.E.S. of The Seven Pillars and Mint) is dead. Not regretted either. My last ten years have been the best of my life. I think I shall look back on my 35-45 period as golden."

[Letters No. 508 to Lady Astor dated 31 December 1933] "My cottage is lovely: but the drought has dried up all the others springs on the heath. So every neighbor draws, by bucket and cask and tub, from mine: and to satisfy their thirsts, I must forgo my bath. So it wasn't, probably, as clean a Christmas as yours."

[Letters No. 508 to Lady Astor dated 31 December 1933] "If only one might never come nearer to people than in the street," "

[Letters No. 567 to Peter Davies 28 February 1935] "As for fame-after death, it's a thing to spit at; the only minds worth winning are the warms ones about us. If we miss those we are failures."