Lawrence Durrell

Music is only love looking for words.

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.

— 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

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

It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— 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

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— 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

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

— Lawrence Durrell

That house with its remoteness and the islands going down like soft gongs all the time into the amazing blue, and I shall never,never ever forget a youth spent there, discovered by accident. It was pure gold. But then of course ...youth does mean happiness, it does mean love, and that's something you can't get over.

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— 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

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

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 return link by link along the iron chains of memory to the city which we inhabited so briefly together:the city which used us as its flora-precipitated in us conflicts which were hers and which we mistook for our own:beloved Alexandria!

— Lawrence Durrell

Our common actions in reality are simply the sackcloth covering which hides the cloth-of-gold - the meaning of the pattern. 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

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

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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 (I)

— Lawrence Durrell

the confluent smallpox - invented perhaps as the cruellest remedy for human vanity (II)

— Lawrence Durrell

His profession [ diplomacy ] — offered him something like a long Jesuitical training in self-deception which enabled him to present an ever more highly polished surface to the world without deepening his human experience [-] for he lived surrounded by his ambitious and sycophantic fellows who taught him only how to excel in forms of address, and the elaborate kindnesses which, in pleasing, pave the way to advancement. (II)

— Lawrence Durrell

Then he saw that she was blind, her face slightly upcast to her companion's in the manner of those whose expressions never fully attain their target - the eyes of another. (II)

— Lawrence Durrell

here was Kenilworth now heading the new department concerned with Personnel [-] one of those blank administrative constructs which offered no openings into the world of policy. A dead end. [-] he would soon develop the negative powers of obstruction which always derive from a sense of failure. (IV)

— Lawrence Durrell

In French the truth of passion stood up coldly and cruelly to the scrutiny of human experience. In his own curious phrase he [Pursewarden] had always qualified it as 'an unsniggerable language'. (VIII)

— Lawrence Durrell

The Copts — the only branch of the Christian Church which was thoroughly integrated into the Orient! But then your good Bishop of Salisbury openly said he considered these oriental Christians as worse than infidels, and your Crusaders massacred them joyfully.

— Lawrence Durrell

Subconsciously he knew too, that the oriental woman is not a sensualist in the European sense; there is nothing mawkish in her constitution. Her true obsessions are power, politics and possessions - however much she might deny it. The sex ticks on in the mind, but its motions are warmed by the kinetic brutalities of money. (X)

— Lawrence Durrell

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

— 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

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

— Lawrence Durrell

He had at last discovered that love had no pith in it, and that the projection of one own's feelings upon the images of a beloved was in the long run, an act of self-mutilation.

— Lawrence Durrell

I imagine, therefore I belong and am free.

— Lawrence Durrell