Lawrence Durrell: Quotes about love

Lawrence Durrell was British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer. Explore interesting quotes on love.
Lawrence Durrell: 104 quotes11 likes

“Music is only love looking for words.”

Lawrence Durrell

“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

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

Lawrence Durrell book Monsieur

Source: Monsieur

“Love is poetry plus biology.”

Lawrence Durrell

“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)

“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)

“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 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

“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

“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 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)

“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

“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)

“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