Top 100 Durrell Quotes
#1. I think the kind of unexpected I really love is when you open books and the actual way of writing is different and interesting. Like reading Virginia Woolf for the first time or Lawrence Durrell for the first time.
Lalla Ward
#2. Mark Helprin and Lawrence Durrell, both of whom write fat and florid novels that appall me now but opened my eyes to the power of fiction when I was in my 20s.
Kevin Patterson
#3. If naturalists go to heaven (about which there is considerable ecclesiastical doubt), I hope that I will be furnished with a troop of kakapo to amuse me in the evening instead of television.
Gerald Durrell
#4. I hope that, in a small way, I am interesting people in animal life and in its conservation. If I accomplish this I will consider that I have achieved something worth while. And if I can, later on, help even slightly towards preventing an animal from becoming extinct, I will be content.
Gerald Durrell
#5. Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?
Lawrence Durrell
#6. What fools we are, eh? What fools, sitting here in the sun, singing. And of love, too! I am too old for it and you are too young, and yet we waste our time singing about it.
Ah, well, let's have a glass of wine, eh?
Gerald Durrell
#7. 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
#8. Animals generally return the love you lavish on them by a swift bite in passing-not unlike friends and wives.
Gerald Durrell
#10. 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
#11. Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.
Lawrence Durrell
#13. The effective in art is what rapes the emotions of your audience without nourishing its values.
Lawrence Durrell
#14. 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
#15. Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine
Lawrence Durrell
#16. 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
#17. Larry was always full of ideas about things of which he had no experience.
Gerald Durrell
#18. Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me, and then show me the place where he was hanged.
Lawrence Durrell
#19. I see artists as a great battalion moving through paint, words, music towards cosmological interpretation.
Lawrence Durrell
#20. But throughout my life I have rarely if ever achieved what I wanted by tackling it in a logical fashion.
Gerald Durrell
#21. To be the equal of reality you must learn how to ignore it without danger.
Lawrence Durrell
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. It was no half-hearted spring, this: the whole island vibrated with it as though a great, ringing chord had been struck. Everyone and everything heard it and responded.
Gerald Durrell
#25. When man continues to destroy nature, he saws the very branch on which he sits since the rational protection of nature is at the same time the protection of mankind
Gerald Durrell
#27. I said I *liked* being half-educated; you were so much more *surprised* at everything when you were ignorant.
Gerald Durrell
#29. 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!
Lawrence Durrell
#30. Science is the poetry of the intellect and poetry the science of the heart's affections.
Lawrence Durrell
#31. Gradually the magic of the island [Corfu] settled over us as gently and clingingly as pollen.
Gerald Durrell
#33. 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
#34. 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.
Lawrence Durrell
#35. This is what is meant by possession - to be passionately at war for the qualities in one another to contend for the treasures of each other's personalities. But how can such a war be anything but destructive and hopeless?
Lawrence Durrell
#36. A taste older than meat, older than wine. A taste as old as cold water.
Lawrence Durrell
#37. Prohibitions create the desire they were intended to cure.
Lawrence Durrell
#38. What do you believe? You never say anything. At the most you sometimes laugh.
Lawrence Durrell
#39. There is never enough light." To which I responded without thought: "For women perhaps. We men are less exigent.
Lawrence Durrell
#40. It was my birthday. I lay there savouring the feeling of having a whole day to myself when people would give me presents and the family would be forced to accede to any reasonable requests.
Gerald Durrell
#44. Life, the raw material, is only lived in potentia until the artist deploys it in his work.
Lawrence Durrell
#46. Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment; only there does its satisfaction lie.
Lawrence Durrell
#47. We should tackle reality in a slightly jokey way, otherwise we miss its point.
Lawrence Durrell
#48. If some people want to believe in Jesus, or Mohammed, or Buddha, or their ancestors, who is to say which is right and which wrong? It seems to me that most of the religions in the world are too dogmatic. They preach the 'live and let live' philosophy, but rarely do they practise it.
Gerald Durrell
#49. 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.
Lawrence Durrell
#50. Let us define 'man' as a poet perpetually conspiring against himself.
Lawrence Durrell
#51. 'All we need is a book,' roared Leslie; 'don't panic, hit 'em with a book.
Gerald Durrell
#52. 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
#53. Whatever the heart desires, it purchases at the cost of soul
Lawrence Durrell
#54. 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
#55. 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.
Lawrence Durrell
#56. It only takes one match to ignite a haystack, or one remark to fire a mind.
Lawrence Durrell
#57. I believe that all children should be surrounded by books and animals.
Gerald Durrell
#58. 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
#59. There is a pleasure sure
In being mad, which none but madmen know.
Dryden, The Spanish Friar II, i
Gerald Durrell
#60. There is always a philosophy behind the misadventures of men, even if they are unaware of it.' And
Lawrence Durrell
#61. Every man is made of clay and diamond, and no woman can nourish both.
Lawrence Durrell
#62. 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
#63. I do wish you wouldn't argue with me when I'm knitting.
Gerald Durrell
#64. 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
#65. Erosion, desertification, and pollution have become our lot. It is a weird form of suicide, for we are bleeding our planet to death.
Gerald Durrell
#66. 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.
Lawrence Durrell
#67. Books everywhere piled up in heaps, the rare companions of a solitude not self-imposed but sought.
Lawrence Durrell
#68. 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
#69. 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
#72. 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
#74. 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
#75. By neglecting our garden, we are storing up for ourselves, in the not very distant future, a world catastrophe as bad as any atomic war, and we are doing it with all the bland complacency of an idiot child chopping up a Rembrandt with a pair of scissors.
Gerald Durrell
#76. Life is like a cucumber. One minute it's in your hand, the next it's up you ass.
Lawrence Durrell
#77. 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.
Lawrence Durrell
#78. 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
#79. Now stiff on a pillar with a phallic air nelson stylites in Trafalgar square reminds the British what once they were.
Lawrence Durrell
#80. It is the duty of every patriot to hate his country creatively.
Lawrence Durrell
#81. Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.
Lawrence Durrell
#82. All culture corrupts, but French culture corrupts absolutely.
Lawrence Durrell
#83. 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
#86. 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
#87. A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.
Lawrence Durrell
#88. 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.
Lawrence Durrell
#91. 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
#92. How grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work.
Lawrence Durrell
#93. The Magenpies, obviously suspecting Larry of being a dope smuggler, had fought valiantly with the time of bicarbonate of soda, and had scattered its contents along a line of books, so that they looked like a snow-covered mountain range.
Gerald Durrell
#94. the indifference of the natural world to the constructions of art
Lawrence Durrell
#95. 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
#96. Brazil is bigger than Europe, wilder than Africa, and weirder than Baffin Land.
Lawrence Durrell
#97. Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.
Lawrence Durrell
#98. 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
#100. You see, nothing matters except pleasure - which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.
Lawrence Durrell
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