Lawrence Durrell quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Lawrence Durrell

Lawrence Durrell Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Lawrence Durrell on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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?

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

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

Gamblers and lovers really play to lose.

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.

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

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

Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.

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!

Love is poetry plus biology.

She looked like a statue of pride hanging its head.

It is hard to fight with one's heart's desires; whatever it wishes to get, it purchases at the cost of the soul.

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

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

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

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

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

the indifference of the natural world to the constructions of art

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

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

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

It is not peace we seek but meaning.

Truth is a woman. That is why it is enigmatic.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Comedians are the nearest to suicide.

It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.

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

...man is only an extension of the spirit of place.

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

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

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

Music is only love looking for words.

Art like life is an open secret.

Each of our five senses contains an art.

Sorrow is implicit in love as gravitation is implicit in mass.

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

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

History - the lamp which illumines national character ...

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

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

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

There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.

I love the French edition with its uncut pages. I would not want a reader too lazy to use a knife on me.

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

Prohibitions create the desire they were intended to cure.

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

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

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

Every man is made of clay and diamond, and no woman can nourish both.

Truth disappears with the telling of it.

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

But there are more than five sexes and only demotic Greek seems to distinguish among them.

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

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.

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

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

Truth is what most contradicts itself.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

If you have tendencies you've got to have scope

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

Words, the acid-bath of words.

Most people lie and let life play upon them like the tepid discharges of a douche-bag.

Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.

But that is what islands are for; they are places where different destinies can meet and intersect in the full isolation of time.

The memory of man is as old as misfortune

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

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

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

Poetry is what happens when an anxiety meets a technique.

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

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

History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living

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

i imagine therefore I belong and am free.

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

Her efforts to achieve herself had led her always towards, and not away from him.

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

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

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

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

In marriage they legitimized despair; every kiss is the conquest of a repulsion.

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