Lawrence Durrell Quotes

“Love is like trench warfare - you cannot see the enemy, but you know he is there and that it is wiser to keep your head down.”

“Art like life is an open secret.”

“We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.”

“Love is poetry plus biology.”

“The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you…”

“Sorrow is implicit in love as gravitation is implicit in mass.”

“A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.”

“A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.”

“There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.”

“There is no pain compared to that of loving a woman who makes her body accessible to one and yet who is incapable of delivering her true self -- because she does not know where to find it.”

“Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.”

“I don’t believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he has not experienced.”

“These are the moments which are not calculable, and cannot be assessed in words; they live on in the solution of memory, like wonderful creatures, unique of their own kind, dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean.”

“Gamblers and lovers really play to lose.”

“Odd, isn't it? He really was the right man for her in a sort of way; but then as you know, it is a law of love that the so-called 'right' person always comes to soon or too late.”

“It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.”

“Science is the poetry of the intellect and poetry the science of the heart's affections.”

“History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living”

“An idea is like a rare bird which cannot be seen. What one sees is the trembling of the branch it has just left.”

“I had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time - those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything.”

“Art—the meaning of the pattern of our common actions in reality. The cloth-of-gold that hides behind the sackcloth of reality, forced out by the pain of human memory.”

“In French the truth of passion stood up coldly and cruelly to the scrutiny of human experience. In his own curious phrase he [Pursewarden] had always qualified it as 'an unsniggerable language.”

“Our common actions in reality are simply the sackcloth covering which hides the cloth-of-gold - the meaning of the pattern. For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential—the imagination.”

“Lovers can find nothing to say to each other that has not been said and unsaid a thousand times over. Kisses were invented to translate such nothings into wounds”

“here was Kenilworth now heading the new department concerned with Personnel [-] one of those blank administrative constructs which offered no openings into the world of policy. A dead end. [-] he would soon develop the negative powers of obstruction which always derive from a sense of failure.”

“I remember Nessim once saying [-] that Alexandria was the great winepress of love; those who emerged from it were the sick men, the solitaries, the prophets-I mean all who have been deeply wounded in their sex.”

“I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.”

“Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will—whatever we may think.”

“Subconsciously he knew too, that the oriental woman is not a sensualist in the European sense; there is nothing mawkish in her constitution. Her true obsessions are power, politics and possessions - however much she might deny it. The sex ticks on in the mind, but its motions are warmed by the kinetic brutalities of money.”

“I think often, and never without a certain fear of Nessim's love for Justine. [-] It coloured his unhappiness with a kind of ecstasy [-] Yet one touch of humour would have saved him from such dreadful comprehensive suffering.”

“No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.”

“The appalling thing is the degree of charity women are capable of. You see it all the time … love lavished on absolute fools. Love's a charity ward, you know.”

“the confluent smallpox - invented perhaps as the cruellest remedy for human vanity”

“Then he saw that she was blind, her face slightly upcast to her companion's in the manner of those whose expressions never fully attain their target - the eyes of another.”

“Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment; only there does its satisfaction lie.”

“Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.”

“That house with its remoteness and the islands going down like soft gongs all the time into the amazing blue, and I shall never, never ever forget a youth spent there, discovered by accident. It was pure gold. But then of course …youth does mean happiness, it does mean love, and that's something you can't get over.”

“He had at last discovered that love had no pith in it, and that the projection of one own's feelings upon the images of a beloved was in the long run, an act of self-mutilation.”

“I return link by link along the iron chains of memory to the city which we inhabited so briefly together:the city which used us as its flora-precipitated in us conflicts which were hers and which we mistook for our own:beloved Alexandria!”

“Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.”

“Brazil is bigger than Europe, wilder than Africa, and weirder than Baffin Land.”

“It's only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness.”

“His profession [ diplomacy ] — offered him something like a long Jesuitical training in self-deception which enabled him to present an ever more highly polished surface to the world without deepening his human experience [-] for he lived surrounded by his ambitious and sycophantic fellows who taught him only how to excel in forms of address, and the elaborate kindnesses which, in pleasing, pave the way to advancement.”

“Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.”

“The Copts — the only branch of the Christian Church which was thoroughly integrated into the Orient! But then your good Bishop of Salisbury openly said he considered these oriental Christians as worse than infidels, and your Crusaders massacred them joyfully.”

“It's unthinkable not to love — you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin.”

“Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.”

“For the body is only the outer periphery of the spirit, its solid part.”