Lawrence Durrell > Quotes

“Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“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, Justine

“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

“A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me, and then show me the place where he was hanged.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“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, Justine

“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

“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, Justine

“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, Balthazar

“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.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Spirit of Place : Letters and Essays on Travel

“Gamblers and lovers really play to lose.”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“Music is only love looking for words.”
― Lawrence Durrell

“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

“History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living”
― Lawrence Durrell

“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

“Science is the poetry of the intellect and poetry the science of the heart's affections.”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“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.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar

“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, Bitter Lemons of Cyprus

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

“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, Balthazar

“The world is like a cucumber—today it's in your hand, tomorrow up your arse.”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“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.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar

“Art like life is an open secret.”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“You see, nothing matters except pleasure - which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“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, Balthazar

“Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Clea

“The loved object is simply one that has shared an experience at the same moment of time, narcissistically; and the desire to be near the beloved object is at first not due to the idea of possessing it, but simply to let the two experiences compare themselves, like reflections in different mirrors. All this may precede the first look, kiss, or touch; precede ambition, pride, or envy; precede the first declarations which mark the turning point—for from here love degenerates into habit, possession, and back to loneliness.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“…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”
― Lawrence Durrell, Reflections on a Marine Venus: A Companion to the Landscape of Rhodes

“Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine”
― Lawrence Durrell, Clea