Lawrence Durrell Quotes
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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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I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.
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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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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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Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.
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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 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.
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Brazil is bigger than Europe, wilder than Africa, and weirder than Baffin Land.
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Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.
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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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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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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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No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.
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A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.
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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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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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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.
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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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Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.
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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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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.
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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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A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.