Lawrence Durrell Cyprus Quotes

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.

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

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

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. They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures - and the best of them lead us not only outwards in space, but inwards as well. Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection....

... history - the lamp which illumines national character...

Life in an island, however rich, is circumscribed, and one does well to portion out one’s experiences, for sooner or later one arrives at a point where all is known and staled by repetition. Taken leisurely, with all one’s time at one’s disposal Cyprus could, I calculate, afford one a minimum of two years reckoned in terms of novelty; hoarded as I intended to hoard it, it might last anything up to a decade. That is why I wished to experience it through its people rather than its landscape, to enjoy the sensation of sharing a common life with the humble villagers of the place; and later to expand my field of investigation to its history—the lamp which illumines national character—in order to offer my live subjects a frame against which to set themselves. Alas! I was not to have time.

Last night the sound of the front door closing upon breathless chuckles and secretive panting, then the voice of Paddy Leigh Fermor: “Any old clothes?” in Greek. Appeared with his arm round the shoulders of Michaelis who had shown him the way up the rocky path in darkness. “Joan is winded, holed below the Plimsoll line. I’ve left her resting halfway up. Send out a seneschal with a taper, or a sedan if you have one.” It is as joyous a reunion as ever we had in Rhodes. After a splendid dinner by the fire he starts singing, songs of Crete, Athens, Macedonia. When I go out to refill the ouzo bottle at the little tavern across the way I find the street completely filled with people listening in utter silence and darkness. Everyone seems struck dumb. “What is it?” I say, catching sight of Frangos. “Never have I heard of Englishmen singing Greek songs like this!” Their reverent amazement is touching; it is as if they want to embrace Paddy wherever he goes.

A tree is a memory keeper. Tangled beneath our roots, hidden inside our trunks, are the sinews of history, the ruins of wars nobody came to win, the bones of the missing. The water sucked up through our boughs is the blood of the earth, the tears of the victims, and the ink of truths yet to be acknowledged. Humans, especially the victors who hold the pen that writes the annals of history, have a penchant for erasing as much as documenting. It remains to us plants to collect the untold, the unwanted. Like a cat that curls up on its favourite cushion, a tree wraps itself around the remnants of the past. When Lawrence Durrell, having fallen in love with Cyprus, decided to plant cypresses behind his house and took his spade to the soil, he found skeletons in his garden. Little did he know that this was by no means unusual. All around the world, wherever there is, or has ever been, a civil war or an ethnic conflict, come to the trees for clues, because we will be the ones that sit silently in communion with human remains.

Two things spread quickly: gossip and a forest fire”—Cypriot proverb.) I

if you intend to try and work, not to sit under the Tree of Idleness.

this wonder of an Englishman who spoke indifferent but comprehensible Greek.… Before we parted he drew a

The cousin was made of different stuff; his biting air of laziness and superiority made one want to kick him.

Conversely the British saw a one-dimensional figure in the Cypriot; they did not realize how richly the landscape was stocked with the very sort of characters who rejoice the English heart in a small country town—the rogue, the drunkard, the singer, the incorrigible.

Perhaps language was the key—it was hard to say. Certainly I was astonished to find how few Cypriots knew good English, and how few Englishmen the dozen words of Greek which cement friendships and lighten the burdens of everyday life.