Alexandria Quartet Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Gamblers and lovers really play to lose.

These are the moments which are not calculable, and cannot be assessed in words; they live on in the solution of memory, like wonderful creatures, unique of their own kind, dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean.

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

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.

إنه لأمر فظيع أن يلوم الإنسان نفسه فوق ما يُعانيه من شقاء وعذاب.

Art like life is an open secret.

The world is like a cucumber—today it's in your hand, tomorrow up your arse.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Look at all the Eastern writers who've written great Western literature. Kazuo Ishiguro. You'd never guess that The Remains of the Day or Never Let Me Go were written by a Japanese guy. But I can't think of anyone who's ever done the reverse-- any Westerner who's written great Eastern literature. Well, maybe if we count Lawrence Durrell - does the Alexandria Quartet qualify as Eastern literature?" "There is a very simple test," said Vikram. "Is it about bored, tired people having sex?" "Yes," said the convert, surprised. "Then it's western.

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

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

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.

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!

I have been thinking about the girl I met last night in the mirror: dark on the marble-ivory white: glossy black hair: deep suspiring eyes in which one's glances sink because they are nervous, curious, turned to sexual curiosity.

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?

إننا نستخدم بعضنا البعض كمعاول نهدم بها هؤلاء الذين نحبهم حبا حقيقيا.

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

الكراهية ما هى إلا حب لم يتحقق.

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

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

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.

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

She took kisses like so many coats of paint […] how long and how vainly I searched for excuses which might make her amorality if not palatable at lest understandable. I realize now the time I wasted in this way; instead of enjoying her and turning aside from these preoccupations with the thought, ‘She is untrustworthy as she is beautiful. She takes love as plants do water, lightly, thoughtlessly.

أسوأ فشل عانيته هو فشلى مع الناس: ولقد كان ذلك نتاج انفصال روحى أخذ يزداد بالتدريج، انفصال نهائى عن التملك بينما أطلق لى العنان كى أتعاطف مع الناس. وغدوت شيئا فشيئا وعلى نحو لا يمكن تفسيره أشد عجزا عن ممارسة الحب.

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

اننا عادة ما نولد لكي نحب هؤلاء الذين يصيبوننا بالجراح اكثر من غيرهم رباعية الإسكندرية - بلتازار

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

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.

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

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.

مظهره الخارجى لم يحمل أى إشارة تنبئ عن هذه الصراعات، فقد ظل حديثه جافا موزونا رغم حمى الأفكار التى تكمن وراءه.

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 do the ordinary people, but to fulfill it in its true potential - the imagination.

إن المرء يحتاج لقدر هائل من الجهل حتى يقرب الله، وأعتقد أننى كنت أعرف على الدوام أكثر مما يجب.

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

Each of our five senses contains an art.

إن الحب يغدو أكثر صدقا إذا كان مصدره التعاطف لا الشهوة، لأنه لا يترك حينئذ أى جراح.

He hablado de la inutilidad del arte, pero no he dicho la verdad sobre el consuelo que procura.

إننى الوحدة ذاتها.

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

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.

إن التجاعيد تترك على مر الأيام بصمات أشد عمقا.

إن كل إنسان يغادر هذا العالم على أنغام موسيقاه الخاصة.

لم تفعل أى من الديانات أكثر من المنع والحرمان وإضافة قائمة طويلة من المحرمات. إلا أن المحرمات تخلق الرغبة التى أرادت الأديان علاجها.

عرفت فى مسلكه الفظ واكتآبه الإرهاق الذى يلاحق الفنان عندما يصل بواحدة من أعماله إلى نهايتها. تلك هى لحظات الهبوط النفسى عندما تبدأ هواجس الانتحار فى الانتعاش من جديد.

ما أعجب الغيرة وما أدنأها. غير أن الغيرة النابعة من خيال العاشق تنتهى إلى أن تكون أمرا مثيرا للسخرية.

Youth is the age of despairs.

الحب ليس إلا نوعا من اللغة التى يتحدث بها الجسد.

ويكتب بورسواردن: "فى البداية نسعى كى نملأ بالحب فراغ ذواتنا ونستمتع لحظة قصيرة بوهم الكمال. لكن ذلك ليس إلا وهما. حيث إن هذا المخلوق الغريب الذى أعتقدنا أنه سيصلنا بجسد العالم، قد نجح فى النهاية، فى فصلناعنه فصلا تاما. الحب يصل ثم يفرق وإلا فكيف لنا أن ننمو؟

She gave me the impression of someone engaged in giving a series of savage caricatures of herself — but this is common to most lonely people who feel that their true self can find no correspondence in another.

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... For from here love degenerates into habit, possession, and back to loneliness.

If she ever knew me at all she must later have discovered that for those of us who feel deeply and who are at all conscious of the inextricable tangle of human thought there is only one response to be made—ironic tenderness and silence.

كان متنبها إلى أن تغييرا فى طبيعته يتم فى أعماقه وأن هذا التغيير ينفض عنه أخيرا ذلك الشلل الطويل، شلل الحب العاجز الذى كان يسيطر على أفعاله.

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.

The most tender, the most tragic of illusions is perhaps to believe that our actions can add or subtract from the total quantity of good and evil in the world.

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

إنني اعتقد أن الأحداث ما هي إلا تفسير لمشاعرنا، يمكن ان تقودنا واحدة منها إلى الأخرى. الزمن يحملنا إلى الأمام بقوة تلك المشاعر التي تعيش في أعماقنا والتي لا نعي عنها إلا القليل.

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

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

إن تداخل الحقائق هو الطريقة الوحيدة كى تكون أمينا مع الزمن، حاشد فى كل لحظة باحتمالات لانهائية التكاثر. والحياة تتوقف على فعل الاختيار، أبدية الدينونة، وأبدية الانتقاء.

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.

The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time." Lawrence Durrell in "Clea," book three of the epic Alexandria Quartet - which I am reading for the third time since my early 20s...relishing its superb prose and enigmatic insights into the nature of love.

إننى أعتقد، أنه من الأفضل لنا أن ندير ظهورنا بوضوح للكلمات الرنانة مثل "الجمال" و"الحقيقة" وما الى ذلك. هل ترين ما أرى؟ إننا سخفاء للغاية، وضعاف العقول عندما نتناول أمور الحياة،لكننا عمالقة عندما نحكم على الكون.

Landscape-tones: brown to bronze, steep skyline, low cloud, pearl ground with shadowed oyster and violet reflections. The lion-dust of desert: prophets’ tombs turned to zinc and copper at sunset on the ancient lake.

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.

In her, as an Alexandrian, licence was in a curious way a form of self-abnegation, a travesty of freedom; and if I saw her as an exemplar of the city it was not of Alexandria, or Plotinus that I was forced to think, but of the sad thirtieth child of Valentinus who fell, ‘not like Lucifer by rebelling against God, but by desiring too ardently to be united to him’.*

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".

إن الأحداث البعيدة تكتسب وقد حولتها وغيرتها الذاكرة لمعاناً مصقولا لأنها ترى في عزلتها، مفصولة عن التفاصيل السابقة واللاحقة عن خيوط الزمن ولفافاته. إن ممثلي الأحداث يعانون أيضاً التحويل والتغير، ويغطسون في بطء، أعمق فأعمق في محيط الذاكرة كالأجساد مثقلة، ويجدون عند كل مستوى في القلب الانساني تقديراً جديداً، وتقييماً جديداً

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.

أفكر في أن المدينة كالانسان تجمع ميولها وشهواتها ومخاوفها. إنها تنمو حتى تبلغ النضج وتقدم أنبياءها، ثم تنحدر إلى التبلد أو الشيخوخة أو الوحدة وهي أسوأ من كليهما. والأحياء لا يزلن يجلسن على قارعة الطريق، لا يدرين أن المدينة تموت، يجلسن كالتماثيل المنصوبة يسندن الظلام، وآلآم المستقبل ترقد فوق جفونهن، ترقب في يقظة، الباحثين عن الخلود عبر كل تنبؤات الزمن

One always falls in love with the love-choice of the person one loves.

A puritan culture’s conception of art is something which will endorse its morality and flatter its patriotism. Nothing else.

الأخلاق لا شئ إن كانت مجرد شكل مظهرى للسلوك الطيب.

إننا جميعا نسعى حتى نصل إلى أسباب معقولة لإيماننا بالمستحيل.

أدركت حينئذ حقيقة الحب كله: أدركت أنه شئ مطلق يأخذ كل شئ أو يخسر كل شئ.

For all drama creates bondage, and the actor is only significant to the degree that he is bound.

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

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

Let us go to bed together and ignore the loutish reality of the world.

The seeds of future events are carried within ourselves. They are implicit in us and unfold according to the laws of their own nature

The telephone is a modern symbol for communications which never take place

She looked like a statue of pride hanging its head.

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

First you have to know and understand intellectually what you want to do - then you have to sleepwalk a little to reach it.

If things were always what they seemed, how impoverished would be the imagination of man!

Some characters in the world are marked down for self-destruction, and to these no amount of rational argument can appeal.

El dolor mismo es el único elemento de la memoria; porque el placer termina en sí mismo

Cuesta mucho luchar contra el deseo del corazón; todo lo que quiere obtener, lo compra al precio del alma.

It was, if you like, the flirtation of minds prematurely exhausted by experience which seemed so much more dangerous than a love founded in sexual attraction.

My friends must all have known all along. Yet nobody breathed a word. But of course, the truth is that nobody ever does breathe a word, nobody interferes, nobody whispers while the acrobat is on the tight-rope; they just sit and watch the spectacle, waiting only to be wise after the event.

لسنوات كان على المرء أن يتحمل الشعور بأن الناس لا تعبأ به، لا تبالى به مبالاة حقيقية، ثم يدرك ذات يوم بانزعاج شديد، أن الله هو الذى لا يعبأ وأن الأمر لا يقف عند هذا الحد، ولكنه لا يعبأ به على أى حال من الأحوال!

First the young, like vines, climb up the dull supports of their elders who feel their fingers on them, soft and tender; then the old climb down the lovely supporting bodies of the young into their proper deaths.

The old love was slowly metamorphosed into admiration, just as his physical longing for her (so bitter at first) turned into a consuming and depersonalized tenderness which fed upon her absence instead of dying from it.

This is what is meant by possession - to be passionately at war for the qualities in one another to contend for the treasures of each other’s personalities. But how can such a war be anything but destructive and hopeless?

There was some unresolved inner knot which she wished to untie and which was quite beyond my skill as a lover or a friend. Of course. Of course. I knew as much as could be known of the psychopathology of hysteria at that time.

None of the great religions have done more than exclude, throw out a long range of prohibitions. But prohibitions create the desire they are intended to cure. We of this Cabal say: indulge but refine. We are enlisting everything in order to make man's wholeness match the wholeness of the universe--even pleasure, the destructive granulation of the mind in pleasure.

To these internal pressures we are gracefully adding by direct encouragement, the rigour of a nationalism based in a fanatical religion. I personally admire it, but never forget that it is a fighting religion with no metaphysics, only an ethic.

لقد كان مستعدا أن يعانى كل هذا طالما ظلت المعاناة تحت سيطرة وعيه وإدراكه. لم يكن يخشى غير الشعور بالوحدة الكاملة، كان يدرك عجزه عن إطلاع أى من أصدقائه أو الأطباء، الذين يحتمل استدعاءهم ليفحصوت تصرفاته الشاذة ولا يرون فيها غير أعراض اضطرابه، على تلك الحقيقة.

A good doctor, and in a special sense the psychologist, makes it quite deliberately, slightly harder for the patient to recover too easily. You do this to see if his psyche has any real bounce in it, for the secret of healing is in the patient and not the doctor.

Slowly the bluish spring moon climbs the houses, sliding up the minarets into the clicking palm-trees, and with it the city seems to uncurl like some hibernating animal dug out of its winter earth, to stretch and begin to drink in the music of the three-day festival.

خوفه القديم من الجنون تقدم هنا وأمسك بتلابيبه، وأخل بتوازنه الجسدى، حتى أنه بدأ يعانى من نوبات دوار كانت تجبره على أن يتحسس ما حوله كالأعمى يبحث عن شئ يجلس عليه، مقعد أو كنبه. إنه يجلس وهو يلهث قليلا ويحس العرق وقد بدأ يتصبب من جبينه، غير أنه كان يحس بالارتياح لأن أحدا من العابرين لن يرى شيئا مما يعانيه من صراع داخلى.

that only there, in the silences of the painter or the writer can reality be reordered, reworked and made to show its significant side. 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.

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.

and all at once it seemed that past and present had joined again without any divisions in it, and that all my memories and impressions had ordered themselves into one complete pattern whose metaphor was always the shining city of the disinherited — a city now trying softly to spread the sticky prismatic wings of a new-born dragonfly on the night.

Neden gülüyorsun? En ciddi şeylere bile her zaman gülersin. Ah, öyle ya, üzülmen mi gerekir?" Beni biraz olsun tanısaydı, bizim gibi her şeyi derinlemesine duyan, insan düşüncesinin içinden çıkılmaz düğümünün tam anlamıyla bilincinde olan insanlar için verilecek tek bir yanıt -alaylı bir sevecenlik ve suskunluk- olduğunu daha sonra kendisi de anlardı.

for those of us who feel deeply and who are at all conscious of the inextricable tangle of human thought there is only one response to be made — ironic tenderness and silence.

Death and life are both simply the hazards of a chance which cannot be averted,

You know I never tell a story the same way twice. Does that mean I am lying?

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

Loving is so much truer when sympathy, not desire, makes the match; for it leaves no wounds.

Humility! The last trap that awaits the ego in search of absolute truth.

effect of place upon human temperaments.

Capodistria has the purely involuntary knack of turning everything into a woman; under his eyes chairs become painfully conscious of their bare legs.

Nor can I say that she harmed nobody. But those she harmed most she made fruitful. She expelled people from their old selves.

world is like a cucumber — today it’s in your hand, tomorrow up your arse.

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

الفقر فاصل كبير، والثراء مانع كبير.

النقود.. يجب أن يتأكد المرء على الدوام من وجود مصدر يمده بها.

paederasty is somehow no qualification of

the indifference of the natural world to the constructions of art

I hunt everywhere for a life worth living. Perhaps if I could die or go mad it would provide a focus for all the feelings I have which find no proper outlet.

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

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.

He always puzzled me —except when I had him in my arms.

This world represents the promise of a unique happiness which we are not well-enough equipped to grasp.

One learns nothing from those who return our love.

But then is not life itself a fairy-tale which we lose the power of apprehending as we grow? No matter.

We were like mourners at an invisible cenotaph during the two minutes’ silence which commemorates an irremediable failure of the human will.

(‘Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine’.)

The real teacher is endurance.

A million muffin-eating moralists were waiting, not for us, Brother Ass, but for the plucky and tedious Trollope!

A puritan culture’s conception of art is something which will endorse its morality and flatter its patriotism.

Pensaba y sufría mucho, pero le faltaba la fuerza necesaria para atreverse, primer requisito del que hace algo.

One night he woke to the soughing of great wings and saw a bat-like creature with the head of a violin resting upon the bedrail.

He felt that his mind had become a battle-ground for the forces of good and evil and that his task was to strain every nerve to recognize them, but it was not easy.

Words are the mirrors of our discontents merely; they contain all the huge unhatched eggs of the world's sorrows.

Minds dismembered by their sexual part’ Balthazar had said once ‘never find peace until old age and failing power as persuade them that silence and quietness are not hostile.

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

Разве не зависит все на свете от нашей интерпретации царящего вокруг нас молчания?

In her there was a pliancy, a resilience which was Oriental — a passion to serve.

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

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.

There are two positions available to us – either crime which renders us happy, or the noose, which prevents us from being unhappy.

Of course, one must always remember that truth itself is always halved in utterance.

Cheer up, me boyo, it takes a lifetime to grow. People haven’t the patience any more.

In marriage they legitimized despair,” and “Every kiss is the conquest of a repulsion.

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

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

A city becomes a world when one loves its inhabitants.

I suppose writers are cruel people. The dead do not care. It is the living who might be spared if we could quarry the message which lies buried in the heart of all human experience.

is not the impact of his freewill upon nature which I see (as I thought) but the irresistible growth, through him, of nature’s own blind unspecified doctrines of variation and torment.

If you think of yourself as a sleeping city for example… what? You can sit quiet and hear the processes going on, going about their business; volition, desire, will, cognition, passion, conation.

When you are in love you know that love is a beggar, shameless as a beggar; and the responses of merely human pity can console one where love is absent by a false travesty of an imagined happiness.

God’s real and subtle nature must be clear of distinctions: a glass of spring-water, tasteless, odourless, merely refreshing: and surely its appeal would be to the few, the very few, real contemplatives?

with its head under its wing. I was so sorry, yet so glad. ‘For us, the living, the problem is of a totally different order: how to harness time in the cultivation of a style of heart — something like that?

Nessim waited, feeling suddenly like a European, city-bred, a visitor: for the little party carried with them all the feeling of the tight inbred Arab world — its formal courtesies and feuds — its primitiveness.

was horrified too at the banality of her dancing, which was bad beyond measure; yet watching her make those gentle and ineffectual movements of her slim hands and feet (the air of a gazelle harnessed to a water-wheel)

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.

We have compromised so admirably with the question of their divinity that I should hate to see them replaced by a dictator or a Workers’ Council and a firing squad.” I had to protest at this preposterous view, but he was quite serious. “I assure you that this is the way the left-wing tends; its object is civil war, though it does not realize it — thanks to the cunning with which the sapless puritans like Shaw and company have presented their case.

Tell me how she behaves and I will imitate her. In the dark we are all meat and treacherous however our hair kinks or skin smells. Tell me, and I will give you the wedding-smile and fall into your arms like a mountain of silk.

The slither of tyres across the waves of the desert under a sky blue and frost-bound in winter; or in summer a fearful lunar bombardment which turned the sea to phosphorus — bodies shining like tin, crushed in electric bubbles; or walking to the last spit of sand near Montaza, sneaking through the dense green darkness of the King’s gardens, past the drowsy sentry, to where the force of the sea was suddenly crippled and the waves hobbled over the sand-bar. Or

A drunken whore walks in a dark street at night, shedding snatches of song like petals. Was it in this that Anthony heard the heart-numbing strains of the great music which persuaded him to surrender for ever to the city he loved? The

How do you spell love in Alexandria?' he said at last, softly. 'That is the question. Sleeplessness, loneliness, bonheur, chagrin -- I do not want to harm or annoy her, but I feel that somehow, somewhere, she must need me as I need her.

These notes, however they may be read, are intended only as a painstaking affectionate commentary on a world into which I have been born to share my most solitary moments — those of coitus — with Justine. I can get no nearer to the truth.

There are some characters in this world who are marked down for self-destruction, and to these no amount of rational argument can appeal. For my part Justine always reminded me of a somnambulist discovered treading the perilous leads of a high tower; any attempt to wake her with a shout might lead to disaster. One could only follow her silently in the hope of guiding her gradually away from the great shadowy drops which loomed up on every side. But by some curious paradox it was these

Africa, which they had somehow visualized as an extension of Europe -- an extension of terms, of references to a definitive past -- had already asserted itself as something different: a forbidding darkness where the croaking ravens matched the dry exclamations of spiritless men, and rationed laughter fashioned from breath simply the chattering of baboons. Sometimes they captured someone -- a solitary frightened man out hunting hares -- and were amazed to see that he was human like themselves.

God neither created us nor wished us to be created, but that we are the work of an inferior deity, a Demiurge, who wrongly believed himself to be God? Heavens, how probable it seems; and this overweening hubris has been handed on down to our children.

in the huge gaunt ballroom where the palms splintered themselves in the shivering mirrors: leaking through the windows to where the moonlight waited patiently among the deserted public gardens and highways, troubling the uneasy water of the outer harbour

Lovers are never equally matched — do you think? One always overshadows the other and stunts his or her growth so that the overshadowed one must always be tormented by a desire to escape, to be free to grow. Surely this is the only tragic thing about love?

When the British took control of Egypt the Copts occupied a number of the highest positions in the State. In less than a quarter of a century almost all the Coptic Heads of Departments had disappeared. They were at first fully represented in the bench of judges, but gradually the number was reduced to nil; the process of removing them and shutting the door against fresh appointments has gone on until they have been reduced to a state of discouragement bordering on despair!” These are the words of an Englishman.

Он пригласил ее на танец и, помолчав с минуту, обратился к ней величаво и печально: «Как вы спасаетесь от одиночества?» — спросил он. Мелисса подняла на него взгляд, прямой спокойный взгляд слишком опытной женщины, и ответила мягко: «Мсье, а что, если я и есть одиночество?».

These are the moments which possess the writer, not the lover, and which live on perpetually. One can return to them time and time again in memory, or use them as a fund upon which to build the part of one's life which is writing. One can debauch them with words, but one cannot spoil them.

Годами тебе приходится мириться с тем, что людям, в сущности, нет до тебя дела; и вот в один прекрасный день в тебе прорастает тревога, и ты понимаешь, что тот, которому нет дела, — не кто иной, как Бог, и ему не просто нет дела до тебя, но не существует вообще ничего, до чего ему было бы дело.

This is nothing of medical interest — a small chill. Diseases are not interested in those who want to die.’ And then with one of those characteristic swerves of association, like a swallow turning in mid-air she added, ‘Oh! Nessim, I have always been so strong. Has it prevented me from being truly loved?

I suppose events are simply a sort of annotation of our feelings--the one might be deduced from the other. Time carries us (boldly imagining that we are discrete ego's modeling our own personal futures)--time carries us forward by the momentum of those feelings inside us of which we ourselves are least conscious.

He would wake to see the towers and minarets printed on the exhausted, dust-powdered sky, and see as if en montage on them the giant footprints of the historical memory which lies behind the recollections of individual personality, its mentor and guide: indeed its inventor, since man is only an extension of the spirit of place.

Idle, she writes, to imagine falling in love as a correspondence of minds, of thoughts,; it is a simultaneous firing of two spirits engaged in the autonomous act of growing up. And the sensation is of something having noiselessly exploded inside each of them. Around this event, dazed and preoccupied, the lover moves examining her or her own experience; her gratitude alone, stretching away towards a mistaken donor, creates the illusion that she communicates with her fellow, but this is false. 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.

Высшее достижение великих религий — возведение сложной иерархии запретов. Но запрет рождает ту самую страсть, которую он призван излечить. Мы, каббалисты, говорим — не отвергай, но очищай. Мы принимаем все, дабы приблизить полноту человека к полноте вселенной, — даже удовольствие, разрушительный распад духа в наслаждении на отдельные монады.

If you are born of the artist tribe it is a waste of time to try and function as a priest. You have to be faithful to your angle of vision, and at the same time recognise its partiality. There is a kind of perfection to be achieved in matching oneself to one's capacities at every level. This must, I imagine, do away with strivings, and with illusions too.

am recalling now how during that last spring (forever) we walked together at full moon, overcome by the soft dazed air of the city, the quiet ablutions of water and moonlight that polished it like a great casket. An aerial lunacy among the deserted trees of the dark squares, and the long dusty roads reaching away from midnight to midnight, bluer than oxygen.

In the great quietness of these winter evenings there is one clock: the sea. Its dim momentum in the mind is the fugue upon which this writing is made. Empty cadences of sea-water licking its own wounds, sulking along the mouths of the delta, boiling upon those deserted beaches– empty, forever empty under the gulls: white scribble on the grey, munched by clouds.

Capodistria sits remote from it all, in his immaculate shark-skin coat with the coloured silk handkerchief lolling at his breast. His narrow shoes gleam. His friends call him Da Capo because of a sexual prowess reputed to be as great as his fortune — or his ugliness. He is obscurely related to Justine who says of him: ‘I pity him. His heart has withered in him and he has been left with the five senses, like pieces of a broken wineglass.

It was cold in the street and I crossed to the lighted blaze of shops in Rue Fuad. In a grocer’s window I saw a small tin of olives with the name Orvieto on it, and overcome by a sudden longing to be on the right side of the Mediterranean, entered the shop: bought it: had it opened there and then: and sitting down at a marble table in that gruesome light I began to eat Italy, its dark scorched flesh, hand-modelled spring soil, dedicated vines. I felt that Melissa would never understand this. I should have to pretend I had lost the money. I did not see at first the great car which she had abandoned in the street with its engine running. She came into the shop with swift and resolute suddenness and said, with the air of authority that Lesbians, or women with money, assume with the obviously indigent: ‘What did you mean by your remark about the antinomian nature of irony?’ — or some such sally which I have forgotten.

he had discovered for himself the uselessness of having opinions and in consequence made a habit of usually saying the opposite of what he thought in a joking way. He was an ironist, hence he appeared often to violate good sense: hence too his equivocal air, the apparent frivolity with which he addressed himself to large subjects. This sort of serious clowning leaves footmarks in conversation of a peculiar kind. His little sayings stayed like the pawmarks of a cat in a pat of butter.

Suddenly at the end of the great couloir my vision is sharpened by a pale disjunctive shudder as a bar of buttercup-yellow thickening gradually to a ray falls slowly through the dark masses of cloud to the east. The ripple and flurry of the invisible colonies of birds around us increases. Slowly, painfully, like a half-open door the dawn is upon us, forcing back the darkness. A minute more and a stairway of soft kingcups slides smoothly down out of heaven to touch in our horizons, to give eye and mind an orientation in space which it has been lacking.

The oranges were more plentiful than usual that year. They glowed in their arbours of burnished green leaf like lanterns, flickering up there among the sunny woods. It was as if they were eager to celebrate our departure from the little island -- for at last the long-awaited message from Nessim had come, like a summons back to the Underworld. A message which was to draw me back inexorably to the one city which for me always hovered between illusion and reality, between the substance and the poetic images which its very name aroused in me.... Alexandria, the capital of memory!

Pienso en la época en la que el mundo conocido apenas existía para nosotros cuatro; los días eran simplemente espacios entre sueños, espacios entre capas móviles de tiempo, de actividades, de charla intrascendente... Un flujo y reflujo de asuntos insignificantes, un husmear cosas muertas, fuera de todo ambiente real, que no nos llevaba a ninguna parte, que no nos exigía nada salvo lo imposible: ser nosotros mismos. Justine decía que habíamos quedado atrapados en la proyección de una voluntad demasiado poderosa y deliberada para ser humana, el campo de atracción que Alejandría presentaba hacia los que había elegido para ser sus símbolos vivientes. Lawerence Durrell. Justine. <3

Я говорил о бесполезности искусства, но ничего не сказал о том облегчении, которое оно способно принести. Утешение, которое я нахожу в такого рода работе ума и сердца, состоит в следующем: только здесь, в молчании художника или писателя, реальность можно перестроить, переработать и заставить повернуться значимой стороной. Обычные наши поступки суть не что иное как дерюга, под которой сокрыто златотканое покрывало — источник значений. Нас, художников, здесь ожидает счастливая возможность примириться посредством искусства со всем, что ранило и унижало нас в обыденной жизни, и не бежать от судьбы, как пытаются делать обычные люди, но заставить ее пролиться истинным живым дождем — воображением. Иначе зачем бы мы мучили друг друга?

Idle’ she writes ‘to imagine falling in love as a correspondence of minds, of thoughts; it is a simultaneous firing of two spirits engaged in the autonomous act of growing up. And the sensation is of something having noiselessly exploded inside each of them. Around this event, dazed and preoccupied, the lover moves examining his or her own experience; her gratitude alone, stretching away towards a mistaken donor, creates the illusion that she communicates with her fellow, but this is false. 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.