1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Lawrence Durrell

Lawrence Durrell Quotes

Lawrence George Durrell was an expatriate British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer. He was the oldest brother of naturalist and writer Gerald Durrell.

Born in India to British colonial parents, he was sent to England at the age of eleven for his education. He did not like formal education, but started writing poetry at age 15. His first book was published in 1935, when he was 23. In March 1935 he and his wife, and his mother and younger siblings, moved to the island of Corfu. Durrell spent many years thereafter living around the world.

His most famous work is The Alexandria Quartet, a tetralogy published between 1957 and 1960. The best-known novel in the series is the first, Justine. Beginning in 1974, Durrell published The Avignon Quintet, using many of the same techniques. The first of these novels, Monsieur, or the Prince of Darkness, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1974. The middle novel, Constance, or Solitary Practices, was nominated for the 1982 Booker Prize. By the end of the century, Durrell was a bestselling author and one of the most celebrated writers in England.Durrell supported his writing by working for many years in the Foreign Service of the British government. His sojourns in various places during and after World War II inspired much of his work. He married four times, and had a daughter with each of his first two wives. Wikipedia  

✵ 27. February 1912 – 7. November 1990  •  Other names Lawrence George Durrell
Lawrence Durrell photo

Works

The Alexandria Quartet
The Alexandria Quartet
Lawrence Durrell
Justine
Lawrence Durrell
Balthazar
Balthazar
Lawrence Durrell
The Alexandria Quartet
The Alexandria Quartet
Lawrence Durrell
Justine
Lawrence Durrell
Balthazar
Balthazar
Lawrence Durrell
Lawrence Durrell: 52 quotes11 likes

Famous Lawrence Durrell Quotes

“Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me and then show me the place where he was hanged.”

Lawrence Durrell book Justine

Variant: Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me, and then show me the place where he was hanged.
Source: Justine

“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.”

Lawrence Durrell book Balthazar

Source: Balthazar

“Art like life is an open secret.”

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet

Source: The Alexandria Quartet

“Love is poetry plus biology.”

Lawrence Durrell

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

Lawrence Durrell

Lawrence Durrell Quotes about love

“Music is only love looking for words.”

Lawrence Durrell

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

Lawrence Durrell book Monsieur

Source: Monsieur

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

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet

The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Justine (1957)

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

Lawrence Durrell book Justine

Source: The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Justine (1957)

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

Lawrence Durrell book Justine

Source: The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Justine (1957)

“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.”

Lawrence Durrell

Lawrence Durrell: Trending quotes

“Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.”

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet

The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Clea (1960)

“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.”

Lawrence Durrell

Lawrence Durrell Quotes

“I am quite alone. I am neither happy nor unhappy; I lie suspended like a hair or a feather in the cloudy mixtures of memory.”

Lawrence Durrell book Justine

Source: Justine

“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.”

Lawrence Durrell book Justine

Source: Justine

“Gamblers and lovers really play to lose.”

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet

Source: The Alexandria Quartet

“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.”

Lawrence Durrell book Balthazar

Source: Balthazar

“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.”

Lawrence Durrell

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

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet

Source: The Alexandria Quartet

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

Lawrence Durrell The Avignon Quintet

The Avignon Quintet (1974–1985), Monsieur (1974)
Context: The art of prose governed by syncopated thinking; for thoughts curdle in the heart if not expressed. 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.”

Lawrence Durrell

Source: Bitter Lemons of Cyprus

“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.”

Lawrence Durrell book Justine

Source: Justine

“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.”

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet

Source: The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Mountolive (1958), VIII

“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.”

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet

The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Justine (1957)

“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”

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet

Source: The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Mountolive (1958), I

“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.”

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet

Source: The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Mountolive (1958), IV

“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.”

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet

The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Justine (1957)

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

Lawrence Durrell

Interview in the Sunday Times, 1988

“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.”

Lawrence Durrell book Bitter Lemons

Bitter Lemons (1957)

“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.”

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet

Source: The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Mountolive (1958), X

“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.”

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet

The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Justine (1957)

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

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet

The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Balthazar (1958)

“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.”

Lawrence Durrell

Interview in The Observer, 1990

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

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet

Source: The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Mountolive (1958), II

“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.”

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet

Source: The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Mountolive (1958), II

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

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet

The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Justine (1957)

“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.”

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet

The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Clea (1960)

“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.”

Lawrence Durrell

About the pre-WWII days in Kalami on Corfu (1975), as quoted in Amateurs in Eden (2011) by Joanna Hodgkin, p. 6

“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.”

Lawrence Durrell The Avignon Quintet

The Avignon Quintet (1974–1985), Monsieur (1974)

“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!”

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet

The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Justine (1957)

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

Lawrence Durrell

Letter to Henry Miller, 1948

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

Lawrence Durrell

Interview in Writers at Work, Second Series, ed. George Plimpton (1963)

“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.”

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet

Source: The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Mountolive (1958), II

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

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet

The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Clea (1960)

“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.”

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet

The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Mountolive (1958)

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

Lawrence Durrell

Interview in The Observer, 1990

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

Lawrence Durrell

Interview in the Sunday Times, 1988

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

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet

Quarteto de Alexandria, ALEXANDRIA QUARTET

Se não me engano, no volume Moutolive

Similar authors

Luigi Pirandello photo
Luigi Pirandello7
Italian dramatist, novelist, short story writer, and poet, … None
Doris Lessing photo
Doris Lessing94
British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer … None
William Golding photo
William Golding79
British novelist, poet, playwright and Nobel Prize for Lite… None
W. Somerset Maugham photo
W. Somerset Maugham158
British playwright, novelist, short story writer None
Francois Mauriac photo
Francois Mauriac38
French author None
Mario Benedetti photo
Mario Benedetti4
Uruguayan journalist, novelist, and poet None
Rudyard Kipling photo
Rudyard Kipling200
English short-story writer, poet, and novelist None
Samuel Beckett photo
Samuel Beckett122
Irish novelist, playwright, and poet None
Christopher Morley photo
Christopher Morley30
American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet None
Elias Canetti photo
Elias Canetti43
Bulgarian-born Swiss and British jewish modernist novelist,… None