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.

Idea , Bird

“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)

Thinking

“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

Love , Youth , Time , Housing

“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