Lawrence Durrell famous quotes

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

#Love #Anniversary #Time

Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.
-- Lawrence Durrell

#Travel #Journey #Form

Music is only love looking for words.
-- Lawrence Durrell

#Inspirational #Funny #Music

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

#Silence #Doe #Quiet

It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.
-- Lawrence Durrell

#Love #Jealousy #Envy

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

#Writing #Energy #Neurosis

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

#Children #Land #Landscape

We should tackle reality in a slightly jokey way, otherwise we miss its point.
-- Lawrence Durrell

#Reality #Missing #Way

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

#Heart #Wonder #Show Me

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

#Memories #Ocean #Unique

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

#Art #Pain #Memories

History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.
-- Lawrence Durrell

#History #Historical #Way

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

#Memories #Lying #Hair

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

#Wine #Paris #Glasses

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.
-- Lawrence Durrell

#Music #Lonely #Loneliness

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

#Happiness #Laughter #Men

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

#Believe #Hunting #Reason

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.
-- Lawrence Durrell

#Women #Degrees #Charity

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

#Love #Cities #World

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

#Believe #Reality #Confirmation

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

#Truth #Ladders #Matter

Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.
-- Lawrence Durrell

#Mirrors #Secret #Wish

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

#Long #Rebel #Goes On

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

#Wine #Spite

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

#Age #Insult #Old Age

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

#Thinking #Life Is #Complicated

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

#Reality #Danger #Equal

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

#Writing #Unique #Reality

Whatever the heart desires, it purchases at the cost of soul
-- Lawrence Durrell

#Heart #Soul #Desire

Sorrow is implicit in love as gravitation is implicit in mass.
-- Lawrence Durrell

#Sorrow #Mass #Gravitation

The realisation of one's own death is the point at which one becomes adult.
-- Lawrence Durrell

#Adults #Realisation

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

#Hands #Life Is Like #Cucumbers

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

#Sex #Psychics #People

Truth is a woman. That is why it is enigmatic.
-- Lawrence Durrell

#Truth #Truth Is #Enigmatic

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

#Kissing #Lovers #Unsaid

Comedians are the nearest to suicide.
-- Lawrence Durrell

#Suicide #Comedian

Love joins and then divides. How else would we be growing?
-- Lawrence Durrell

#Love #Growing

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

#Criticism #Literature #Worms

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

#Adversity #Laughing #Bored

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.
-- Lawrence Durrell

#Real #Artist #Men

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

#Artist #Raw Materials #Materials

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

#Fall #Writing #Trying

Truth is what most contradicts itself.
-- Lawrence Durrell

#Truth #Truth Is

It only takes one match to ignite a haystack, or one remark to fire a mind.
-- Lawrence Durrell

#Fire #Mind #Ignite

The memory of man is as old as misfortune
-- Lawrence Durrell

#Memories #Men #Misfortunes

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

#Riches #Poverty #Cutters

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

#Real #Achieve #Refinement

Poetry is what happens when an anxiety meets a technique.
-- Lawrence Durrell

#Anxiety #Technique #Poetry Is

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

#Loneliness #Being Alone #Night

Art like life is an open secret.
-- Lawrence Durrell

#Art #Secret #Life Is

Science is the poetry of the intellect and poetry the science of the heart's affections.
-- Lawrence Durrell

#Heart #Affection #Intellect

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

#Art #Impact #Doe

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

#Girl #Eye #Dark

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.
-- Lawrence Durrell

#Emotion #Language #Flight

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

#Heart #Order #Might

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

#Men #Doctors #Soul

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

#Wish #Lasts #Finals

Gamblers and lovers really play to lose.
-- Lawrence Durrell

#Play #Lovers

…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

#Mean #Sea #Islands

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

#Love #Men #Letters

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

#Desire #Fiction #Bears

Truth disappears with the telling of it.
-- Lawrence Durrell

#Truth #Telling The Truth #Disappear

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

#Funny #Death #Trying

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

#Art #Destiny #Imagination

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

#Pain #Self #Doe

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

#Stars #Healing #Body

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

#Art #Emotion #Audience

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

#Firsts #Resolution #Dare

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

#Men #Law #Too Late

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

#Love Life #Long #Breathe

How grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work.
-- Lawrence Durrell

#Memories #Raw Materials #Daily Work

People only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it.
-- Lawrence Durrell

#People #Missing #Skirts

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

#Mirrors #Evil #Done

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

#Secret #Approach #Idleness

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

#Love Is #Enemy #Warfare

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.
-- Lawrence Durrell

#Beautiful #Kissing #Water

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?
-- Lawrence Durrell

#Thinking #Silence #Promise

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

#Fall #Snow #Bird

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

#Dark #Echoes #Cities

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

#Artist #Littles #Today

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

#Wine #Water #Meat

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

#Women #Animal #Burrowing

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

#Moving #Artist #Paint

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

#Europe #Land #Brazil

Try and travel with the eyes of the spirit wide open, and not too much factual information. To tune in, without reverence, idly -- but with real inward attention. It is to be had for the feeling, that mysterious sense of rapport, of identity with the ground. 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

#Travel #Real #Eye

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

#Beauty #Matter

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

#Opposites #Matter #Pleasure

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

#Loneliness #Ambition #Kissing

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

#Love #Nervous #Breakdown

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

#Lying #Punishment #Guilt

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.
-- Lawrence Durrell

#Hero #Wine #Men

It is not peace we seek but meaning.
-- Lawrence Durrell

#Peace #Passion

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

#Travel #Journey #Thinking

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

#Law #Giving #Dating

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

#Country #Patriotic #Artist

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

#Ideas #Bird #Branches

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

#Squares #Air #Heroism

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

#Events #Baskets #Crabs