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Lawrence Durrell: 104 quotes11 likes

“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

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