Top 100 Lawrence Durrell Quotes
#1. Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?
Lawrence Durrell
#2. 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.
Lawrence Durrell
#3. An idea is like a rare bird which cannot be seen. What one sees is the trembling of the branch it has just left.
Lawrence Durrell
#4. Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.
Lawrence Durrell
#6. The effective in art is what rapes the emotions of your audience without nourishing its values.
Lawrence Durrell
#7. 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.
Lawrence Durrell
#8. Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine
Lawrence Durrell
#9. I have done so many things in my life," she said to the mirror. "Evil things, perhaps. But never unattentively, never wastefully ... was I wrong?
Lawrence Durrell
#10. Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me, and then show me the place where he was hanged.
Lawrence Durrell
#11. I see artists as a great battalion moving through paint, words, music towards cosmological interpretation.
Lawrence Durrell
#12. To be the equal of reality you must learn how to ignore it without danger.
Lawrence Durrell
#13. Basle, Zurich, Baden, Paris - the flickering of steel rails over the arterial systems of Europe's body: steel ganglia meeting and dividing away across mountains and valleys.
Lawrence Durrell
#14. And I saw her as a sad thirtieth child of Valentine that fell, not as Lucifer rebelling against God, but because she too passionately wanted to be united with him! All things in excess become sin.
Lawrence Durrell
#16. Science is the poetry of the intellect and poetry the science of the heart's affections.
Lawrence Durrell
#18. 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.
Lawrence Durrell
#19. A taste older than meat, older than wine. A taste as old as cold water.
Lawrence Durrell
#20. Prohibitions create the desire they were intended to cure.
Lawrence Durrell
#21. What do you believe? You never say anything. At the most you sometimes laugh.
Lawrence Durrell
#25. Life, the raw material, is only lived in potentia until the artist deploys it in his work.
Lawrence Durrell
#26. Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment; only there does its satisfaction lie.
Lawrence Durrell
#27. We should tackle reality in a slightly jokey way, otherwise we miss its point.
Lawrence Durrell
#28. 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.
Lawrence Durrell
#29. When one is fully extended by day and exhausted every evening one lives differently, without the weight of yesterday or tomorrow on one's shoulders. I
Lawrence Durrell
#30. Balthazar sighed and said Truth naked and unashamed. That's a splendid phrase. But we always see her as she seems, never as she is. Each man has his own interpretation.
Lawrence Durrell
#31. There is always a philosophy behind the misadventures of men, even if they are unaware of it.' And
Lawrence Durrell
#32. Every man is made of clay and diamond, and no woman can nourish both.
Lawrence Durrell
#33. 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.
Lawrence Durrell
#34. 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.
Lawrence Durrell
#35. Books everywhere piled up in heaps, the rare companions of a solitude not self-imposed but sought.
Lawrence Durrell
#36. 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.
Lawrence Durrell
#37. 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.
Lawrence Durrell
#40. 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.
Lawrence Durrell
#42. 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.
Lawrence Durrell
#43. 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.
Lawrence Durrell
#44. It is the duty of every patriot to hate his country creatively.
Lawrence Durrell
#45. There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.
Lawrence Durrell
#47. 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.
Lawrence Durrell
#50. I love the French edition with its uncut pages. I would not want a reader too lazy to use a knife on me.
Lawrence Durrell
#51. the indifference of the natural world to the constructions of art
Lawrence Durrell
#52. 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.
Lawrence Durrell
#53. Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.
Lawrence Durrell
#54. 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
Lawrence Durrell
#56. He thought and suffered a good deal but he lacked the resolution to dare
the first requisite of a practitioner.
Lawrence Durrell
#57. A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.
Lawrence Durrell
#59. It is hard to fight with one's heart's desires; whatever it wishes to get, it purchases at the cost of the soul.
Lawrence Durrell
#60. We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.
Lawrence Durrell
#61. 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.
Lawrence Durrell
#62. I suppose the secret of his success is in his tremendous idleness which almost approaches the supernatural.
Lawrence Durrell
#63. And morality is nothing if it is merely a form of good behavior.
Lawrence Durrell
#64. 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.
Lawrence Durrell
#65. But I love to feel events overlapping each other, crawling over one another like wet crabs in a basket
Lawrence Durrell
#66. 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.
Lawrence Durrell
#67. He loved the desert because there the wind blew out one's footsteps like candle flames.
Lawrence Durrell
#68. One word 'love' has to do service for so many different kinds of the same animal.
Lawrence Durrell
#69. To write a poem is like trying to catch a lizard without its tail falling off.
Lawrence Durrell
#71. Everything really desirable has come about because of, or in spite of, wine!
Lawrence Durrell
#72. she had been raped by one of her relations. One cannot help smiling at the commonplaceness of the thought.
Lawrence Durrell
#73. 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.
Lawrence Durrell
#74. People only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it.
Lawrence Durrell
#75. The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.
Lawrence Durrell
#77. Shyness has laws you can only give yourself; tragically to those who least understand.
Lawrence Durrell
#78. 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
Lawrence Durrell
#79. No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.
Lawrence Durrell
#80. Of women, the most we can say, not being Frenchmen, is that they are burrowing animals.
Lawrence Durrell
#81. 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.
Lawrence Durrell
#82. They say that if you get bored enough with calamity you can learn to laugh.
Lawrence Durrell
#83. A diary is the last place to go if you wish to seek the truth about a person. Nobody dares to make the final confession to themselves on paper: or at least, not about love.
Lawrence Durrell
#84. Her efforts to achieve herself had led her always towards, and not away from him.
Lawrence Durrell
#85. We who have travelled much and loved much: we who have
I will not say suffered for we have always recognized through suffering our own self-sufficiency
only we appreciate the complexities of tenderness, and understand how narrowly love and friendship are related
Lawrence Durrell
#86. 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.
Lawrence Durrell
#87. Most people lie and let life play upon them like the tepid discharges of a douche-bag.
Lawrence Durrell
#89. Yet the presence of death always refreshes experience thus--that is its function: to help us deliberate on the novelty of time.
Lawrence Durrell
#90. Is it any wonder that I absent-mindedly take the entrance marked Aliens Only whenever I enter?
Lawrence Durrell
#91. All artists today are expected to cultivate a little fashionable unhappiness.
Lawrence Durrell
#92. The realisation of one's own death is the point at which one becomes adult.
Lawrence Durrell
#93. It's only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness.
Lawrence Durrell
#94. The sense of truth no matter how subjective is necessary for the experience of beauty.
Lawrence Durrell
#96. But that is what islands are for; they are places where different destinies can meet and intersect in the full isolation of time.
Lawrence Durrell
#97. Love joins and then divides. How else would we be growing?
Lawrence Durrell
#98. History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living
Lawrence Durrell
#99. It's unthinkable not to love -you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin.
Lawrence Durrell
#100. The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you ...
Lawrence Durrell
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