Lawrence Durrell: Trending quotes

“Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.”

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

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

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

“Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?”

“Love is poetry plus biology.”

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

“Art like life is an open secret.”

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

“Music is only love looking for words.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”