Lawrence Durrell Quotes & Sayings

Love is horribly stable, and each of us is only allotted a certain portion of it, a ration. It is capable of appearing in an infinity of forms and attaching itself to an infinity of people. But it is limited in quantity, can be used up, become shopworn and faded before it reaches its true object. For its destination lies somewhere in the deepest regions of the psyche where it will come to recognize itself as self-love, the ground upon which we build the sort of health of the psyche. I do not mean egoism or narcissism. — Lawrence Durrell

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

Whatever the heart desires, it purchases at the cost of soul — 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

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

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

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

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

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

If one falls in love with a mask when one is masked oneself ... which of you will first have the courage to raise it? — Lawrence Durrell

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

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

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

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

she had been raped by one of her relations. One cannot help smiling at the commonplaceness of the thought. — Lawrence Durrell

Bessie was News, Leaders, and Gossip; Enid was Features, Make-up and general Sub. Whenever they were at a loss for copy they would mercilessly pillage ancient copies of Punch or Home Chat. An occasional hole in the copy was filled with a ghoulish smudge - local block-making had clearly indicated that somewhere a poker-work fanatic had gone quietly out of his mind. In this way the Central Balkan Herald was made up every morning and then delivered to the composition room where the chain-gang quickly reduced it to gibberish. MINISTER FINED FOR KISSING IN PUBIC. WEDDING BULLS RING OUT FOR PRINCESS. QUEEN OF HOLLAND GIVES PANTY FOR EX-SERVICE MEN. MORE DOGS HAVE BABIES THIS SUMMER IN BELGRADE. BRITAINS NEW FLYING-GOAT. — Lawrence Durrell

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

Youth is the age of despairs. — Lawrence Durrell

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

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

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

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness. — Lawrence Durrell

What do you believe? You never say anything. At the most you sometimes laugh. — Lawrence Durrell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Music is only love looking for words. — Lawrence Durrell

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

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

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

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

For years one has to put up with the feeling that people do not care, really care, about one; then one day with growing alarm, one realizes that it is God who does not care; and not merely that he does not care, he does not care one way or the other. — Lawrence Durrell

And morality is nothing if it is merely a form of good behavior. — Lawrence Durrell

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

Truth is what most contradicts itself. — Lawrence Durrell

Books everywhere piled up in heaps, the rare companions of a solitude not self-imposed but sought. — Lawrence Durrell

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

Gamblers and lovers really play to lose. — Lawrence Durrell

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

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

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

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

I realized then the truth about all love: that it is an absolute which takes all or forfeits all. The other feelings, compassion, tenderness and so on, exist only on the periphery and belong on the constructions of society and habit. But she herself- austere and merciless Aphrodite-is a pagan. it is not our brains or instincts which she picks-but our very bones. — Lawrence Durrell

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

The cocktail party - as the name itself indicates - was originally invented by dogs. They are simply bottom-sniffings raised to the rank of formal ceremonies. — Lawrence Durrell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

... 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

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

He loved the desert because there the wind blew out one's footsteps like candle flames. — Lawrence Durrell

Let us define 'man' as a poet perpetually conspiring against himself. — Lawrence Durrell

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

In these days Melissa's absorbed and provoking gentleness had all the qualities of a rediscovered youth. Her long uncertain fingers - I used to feel them moving over my face when she thought I slept, as if to memorize the happiness we had shared. In her there was a pliancy, a resilience which was Oriental - a passion to serve. My shabby clothes - the way she picked up a dirty shirt seemed to engulf it with an overflowing solicitude; in the morning I found my razor beautifully cleaned and even the toothpaste laid upon the brush in readiness. Her care for me was a goad, provoking me to give my life some sort of shape and style that might match the simplicity of hers. Of her experiences in love she would never speak, turning from them with a weariness and distaste which suggested that they had been born of necessity rather than desire. She paid me the comlpiment of saying: "For the first time I am not afraid to be light-headed or foolish with a man". — Lawrence Durrell

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

No one thing can explain everything; though everything can illuminate something. God, I must be still drunk. If God were anything he would be an art. Sculpture or medicine. But the immense extension of knowledge in this our age, the growth of new sciences, makes it almost impossible for us to digest the available flavours and put them to use. — Lawrence Durrell

One word 'love' has to do service for so many different kinds of the same animal. — Lawrence Durrell

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

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

If you have tendencies you've got to have scope — Lawrence Durrell

Yet the presence of death always refreshes experience thus--that is its function: to help us deliberate on the novelty of time. — Lawrence Durrell

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

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

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

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

Truth disappears with the telling of it. — Lawrence Durrell

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

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

History - the lamp which illumines national character ... — Lawrence Durrell

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is never enough light." To which I responded without thought: "For women perhaps. We men are less exigent. — Lawrence Durrell

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

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

Is it any wonder that I absent-mindedly take the entrance marked Aliens Only whenever I enter? — Lawrence Durrell

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

Each of our five senses contains an art. — Lawrence Durrell

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prohibitions create the desire they were intended to cure. — Lawrence Durrell

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

Our inventions mirror our secret wishes. — Lawrence Durrell

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

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