Lawrence Durrell Quotes

All culture corrupts, but French culture corrupts absolutely.

The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.

It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.

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.

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.

A drunken whore walks in a dark street at night, shedding snatches of song like petals. Was it in this that Anthony heard the heart-numbing strains of the great music which persuaded him to surrender for ever to the city he loved? The

They say that if you get bored enough with calamity you can learn to laugh.

The artist's work constitutes the only satisfactory relationship he can have with his fellow men since he seeks his real friends among the dead and the unborn.

The cocktail party - as the name itself indicates - was originally invented by dogs. They are simply bottom-sniffings raised to the rank of formal ceremonies.

i imagine therefore I belong and am free.

Now stiff on a pillar with a phallic air nelson stylites in Trafalgar square reminds the British what once they were.

Poverty is a great cutter-off and riches a great shutter-off.

All artists today are expected to cultivate a little fashionable unhappiness.

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.

Some characters in the world are marked down for self-destruction, and to these no amount of rational argument can appeal.

There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.

I meant of course the whole portentous scrimmage of sex itself, the act of penetration which could lead a man to despair for the sake of a creature with two breasts and le croissant as the picturesque Levant slang has it.

Truth is a woman. That is why it is enigmatic.

Brazil is bigger than Europe, wilder than Africa, and weirder than Baffin Land.

I am just a refugee from the long slow toothache of English life. It is terrible to love life so much you can hardly breathe!

No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.

Books everywhere piled up in heaps, the rare companions of a solitude not self-imposed but sought.

I love the French edition with its uncut pages. I would not want a reader too lazy to use a knife on me.

He thought and suffered a good deal but he lacked the resolution to dare
the first requisite of a practitioner.

The memory of man is as old as misfortune

Frost in January minus 20 for a week. Dead birds frozen on the branch - they fall with the first thaw like ripe fruit - death-ripened. We shall all end like them - just a stain in the snow.

They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures - and the best of them lead us not only outward in space, but inward as well.

Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine

God did not create us, nor did He wish us to be created. We are the work of a lesser deity, a demiurge, who wrongly believed himself to be God.

I have been thinking about the girl I met last night in the mirror: dark on the marble-ivory white: glossy black hair: deep suspiring eyes in which one's glances sink because they are nervous, curious, turned to sexual curiosity.

It is a pity indeed to travel and not get this essential sense of landscape values. You do not need a sixth sense for it. It is there if you just close your eyes and breathe softly through your nose; you will hear the whispered message, for all landscapes ask the same question in the same whisper. 'I am watching you
are you watching yourself in me?' Most travelers hurry too much ... the great thing is to try and travel with the eyes of the spirit wide open, and not to much factual information. To tune in, without reverence, idly
but with real inward attention. It is to be had for the feeling ... you can extract the essence of a place once you know how. If you just get as still as a needle, you'll be there.

We live" writes Pursewarden somewhere, "lives based upon selected fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time - not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed.

Is it any wonder that I absent-mindedly take the entrance marked Aliens Only whenever I enter?

If one falls in love with a mask when one is masked oneself ... which of you will first have the courage to raise it?

Comedians are the nearest to suicide.

Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.

Whatever the heart desires, it purchases at the cost of soul

Music is only love looking for words.

What are stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?

Gamblers and lovers really play to lose.

It is hard to fight with one's heart's desires; whatever it wishes to get, it purchases at the cost of the soul.

An idea is like a rare bird which cannot be seen. What one sees is the trembling of the branch it has just left.

the indifference of the natural world to the constructions of art

You see, nothing matters except pleasure - which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.

A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.

I suppose events are simply a sort of annotation of our feelings--the one might be deduced from the other. Time carries us (boldly imagining that we are discrete ego's modeling our own personal futures)--time carries us forward by the momentum of those feelings inside us of which we ourselves are least conscious.

Love is horribly stable, and each of us is only allotted a certain portion of it, a ration. It is capable of appearing in an infinity of forms and attaching itself to an infinity of people. But it is limited in quantity, can be used up, become shopworn and faded before it reaches its true object. For its destination lies somewhere in the deepest regions of the psyche where it will come to recognize itself as self-love, the ground upon which we build the sort of health of the psyche. I do not mean egoism or narcissism.

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

Very few people realise that sex is a psychic and not a physical act. The clumsy coupling of human beings is simply a biological paraphrase of this truth - a primitive method of introducing minds to each other, engaging them. But most people are stuck in the physical aspect, unaware of the poetic rapport which it so clumsily tries to teach.

In these days Melissa's absorbed and provoking gentleness had all the qualities of a rediscovered youth. Her long uncertain fingers - I used to feel them moving over my face when she thought I slept, as if to memorize the happiness we had shared. In her there was a pliancy, a resilience which was Oriental - a passion to serve. My shabby clothes - the way she picked up a dirty shirt seemed to engulf it with an overflowing solicitude; in the morning I found my razor beautifully cleaned and even the toothpaste laid upon the brush in readiness. Her care for me was a goad, provoking me to give my life some sort of shape and style that might match the simplicity of hers. Of her experiences in love she would never speak, turning from them with a weariness and distaste which suggested that they had been born of necessity rather than desire. She paid me the comlpiment of saying: "For the first time I am not afraid to be light-headed or foolish with a man".

Truth disappears with the telling of it.

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.

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

Somewhere in the heart of experience there is an order and a coherence which we might purprise if we were attentive enough, loving enough, or patient enough.

And morality is nothing if it is merely a form of good behavior.

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.

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

But I love to feel events overlapping each other, crawling over one another like wet crabs in a basket

This weird translation of feelings into gestures which belied words and words which belied gestures, confused and disoriented her. She needed someone to tell her whether to laugh or to cry.

But there are more than five sexes and only demotic Greek seems to distinguish among them.

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.

For all drama creates bondage, and the actor is only significant to the degree that he is bound.

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.

A critic is a lug-worm in the liver of literature.

I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.

No one thing can explain everything; though everything can illuminate something. God, I must be still drunk. If God were anything he would be an art. Sculpture or medicine. But the immense extension of knowledge in this our age, the growth of new sciences, makes it almost impossible for us to digest the available flavours and put them to use.

Any concentration of the will displaces life and gives it bias in motion. Reality, he believed, was always trying to copy the imagination of man, from which it derived.

Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.

Underneath an artist's preoccupations with sex, society, religion, etc. (all the staple abstractions that allow the forebrain to chatter) there is a soul tortured beyond endurance by the lack of tenderness in the world.

No history much? Perhaps. Only this ominous Dark beauty flowering under veils, Trapped in the spectrum of a dying style: A village like an instinct left to rust, Composed around the echo of a pistol-shot.

Youth is the age of despairs.

I long to be musical in body and mind. I want style, consort. Not the little mental squirts as if through the ticker-tape of the mind.

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.

Each of our five senses contains an art.

...man is only an extension of the spirit of place.

For years one has to put up with the feeling that people do not care, really care, about one; then one day with growing alarm, one realizes that it is God who does not care; and not merely that he does not care, he does not care one way or the other.

I suppose the secret of his success is in his tremendous idleness which almost approaches the supernatural.

Bessie was News, Leaders, and Gossip; Enid was Features, Make-up and general Sub. Whenever they were at a loss for copy they would mercilessly pillage ancient copies of Punch or Home Chat. An occasional hole in the copy was filled with a ghoulish smudge - local block-making had clearly indicated that somewhere a poker-work fanatic had gone quietly out of his mind. In this way the Central Balkan Herald was made up every morning and then delivered to the composition room where the chain-gang quickly reduced it to gibberish. MINISTER FINED FOR KISSING IN PUBIC. WEDDING BULLS RING OUT FOR PRINCESS. QUEEN OF HOLLAND GIVES PANTY FOR EX-SERVICE MEN. MORE DOGS HAVE BABIES THIS SUMMER IN BELGRADE. BRITAINS NEW FLYING-GOAT.

There is always a philosophy behind the misadventures of men, even if they are unaware of it.' And

I see artists as a great battalion moving through paint, words, music towards cosmological interpretation.

History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living

What do you believe? You never say anything. At the most you sometimes laugh.

The steward, according to custom, had stopped all the clocks. This, in the language of Narouz, said, "Your stay with us is so brief, let us not be reminded of the flight of the hours. God made eternity. Let us escape from the despotism of time altogether." These ancient and hereditary politenesses filled Nessim with emotion.

Her efforts to achieve herself had led her always towards, and not away from him.

Everything really desirable has come about because of, or in spite of, wine!

In her, as an Alexandrian, licence was in a curious way a form of self-abnegation, a travesty of freedom; and if I saw her as an exemplar of the city it was not of Alexandria, or Plotinus that I was forced to think, but of the sad thirtieth child of Valentinus who fell, 'not like Lucifer by rebelling against God, but by desiring too ardently to be united to him'.*

Life is like a cucumber. One minute it's in your hand, the next it's up you ass.

Of women, the most we can say, not being Frenchmen, is that they are burrowing animals.

He inhabits now that part of himself
Which lay formerly desolate and uncolonised.

- Mark of Patmos

The effective in art is what rapes the emotions of your audience without nourishing its values.

The sense of truth no matter how subjective is necessary for the experience of beauty.

In India when I was a boy they had great big green lizards there, and if you shouted or shot them their tails would fall off. There was only one boy in the school who could catch lizards intact. No one knew quite how he did it. He had a special soft way of going up to them, and he'd bring them back with their tails on. That strikes me as the best analogy I can give you. To try and catch your poem without its tail falling off.

Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.

A taste older than meat, older than wine. A taste as old as cold water.

Every man is made of clay and diamond, and no woman can nourish both.

It is not peace we seek but meaning.

Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.

It is the duty of every patriot to hate his country creatively.

Art like life is an open secret.

After all the work of the philosophers on his soul and the doctors on his body, what can we really say we know about a man? That he is, when all is said and done, just a passage for liquids and solids, a pipe of flesh.