Lawrence Durrell Quotes
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Then he saw that she was blind, her face slightly upcast to her companion's in the manner of those whose expressions never fully attain their target - the eyes of another. (II)
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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.
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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. (IV)
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A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.
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Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.
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Brazil is bigger than Europe, wilder than Africa, and weirder than Baffin Land.
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It's only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness.
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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.
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There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.
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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.
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Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.
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I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.
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Subconsciously he knew too, that the oriental woman is not a sensualist in the European sense; there is nothing mawkish in her constitution. Her true obsessions are power, politics and possessions - however much she might deny it. The sex ticks on in the mind, but its motions are warmed by the kinetic brutalities of money. (X)
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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.
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A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.
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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.
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Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.
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It's unthinkable not to love - you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin.
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No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.
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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'. (VIII)
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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!
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Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.
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the confluent smallpox - invented perhaps as the cruellest remedy for human vanity (II)
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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.