Lawrence Durrell Quotes
But I love to feel events overlapping each other, crawling over one another like wet crabs in a basket
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.
Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine
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.
An idea is like a rare bird which cannot be seen. What one sees is the trembling of the branch it has just left.
What are stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?
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 see artists as a great battalion moving through paint, words, music towards cosmological interpretation.
Of women, the most we can say, not being Frenchmen, is that they are burrowing animals.
I suppose the secret of his success is in his tremendous idleness which almost approaches the supernatural.
You see, nothing matters except pleasure - which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.
People only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it.
How grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work.
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."
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.
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?
The effective in art is what rapes the emotions of your audience without nourishing its values.
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!
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.
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.
He thought and suffered a good deal but he lacked the resolution to dare--the first requisite of a practitioner.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
... history - the lamp which illumines national character...
