Lawrence Durrell Quotes

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

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

Prohibitions create the desire they were intended to cure.

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

Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.

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.

Music is only love looking for words.

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

To write a poem is like trying to catch a lizard without its tail falling off.

It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.

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.

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

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

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

History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.

The whole Mediterranean, the sculpture, the palm, the gold beads, the bearded heroes, the wine, the ideas, the ships, the moonlight, the winged gorgons, the bronze men, the philosophers - all of it seems to rise in the sour, pungent taste of these black olives between the teeth. A taste older than meat, older than wine. A taste as old as cold water.

Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?

We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it.

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

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.

Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Shyness has laws you can only give yourself; tragically to those who least understand.

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.

The national characteristics... the restless metaphysical curiosity, the tenderness of good living and the passionate individualism. This is the invisible constant in a place with which the ordinary tourist can get in touch just by sitting quite quietly over a glass of wine in a Paris bistro.

I have decided to leave Clea’s last letter un-answered. I no longer wish to coerce anyone, to make promises, to think of life in terms of compacts, resolutions, covenants. It will be up to Clea to interpret my silence according to her own needs and desires, to come to me if she has need or not, as the case may be. Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?

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.

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.

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.

Truth is a matter of direct apprehension-you can't climb a ladder of mental concepts to it.

It’s only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness.

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.

Life, the raw material, is only lived in potentia until the artist deploys it in his work.

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

Truth disappears with the telling of it.

…I once found a list of diseases as yet unclassified by medical science, and among these there occurred the word Islomania, which was described as a rare but by no means unknown affliction of spirit. There are people…who find islands somehow irresistible. The mere knowledge that they are on an island, a little world surrounded by the sea, fills them with an indescribable intoxication. These born “islomanes”…are direct descendents of the Atlanteans

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

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

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

It's unthinkable not to love - you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin.

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

To be the equal of reality you must learn how to ignore it without danger.

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

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.

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

Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment: only there does its satisfaction lie.

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.

She took kisses like so many coats of paint […] how long and how vainly I searched for excuses which might make her amorality if not palatable at lest understandable. I realize now the time I wasted in this way; instead of enjoying her and turning aside from these preoccupations with the thought, ‘She is untrustworthy as she is beautiful. She takes love as plants do water, lightly, thoughtlessly.

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

Religion is simply art bastardized out of all recognition.