Lawrence Durrell Quotes

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

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

Prohibitions create the desire they were intended to cure.

Music is only love looking for words.

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

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

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

It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Truth disappears with the telling of it.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Religion is simply art bastardized out of all recognition.

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

Art like life is an open secret.

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