Lawrence Durrell citations

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

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

“Music is only love looking for words.”

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

“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.”

“Art like life is an open secret.”

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

“Love is poetry plus biology.”

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

“Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.”

“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.”

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

“History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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”

“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.”

“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.”