Lawrence Durrell 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Music is only love looking for words.

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.

History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living

An idea is like a rare bird which cannot be seen. What one sees is the trembling of the branch it has just left.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Art like life is an open secret.

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.

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

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.

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

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 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 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 done so many things in my life," she said to the mirror. "Evil things, perhaps. But never unattentively, never wastefully...was I wrong?

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.

It is a pity indeed to travel and not get this essential sense of landscape values. You do not need a sixth sense for it. It is there if you just close your eyes and breathe softly through your nose; you will hear the whispered message, for all landscapes ask the same question in the same whisper. 'I am watching you -- are you watching yourself in me?' Most travelers hurry too much...the great thing is to try and travel with the eyes of the spirit wide open, and not to much factual information. To tune in, without reverence, idly -- but with real inward attention. It is to be had for the feeling...you can extract the essence of a place once you know how. If you just get as still as a needle, you'll be there.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

i imagine therefore I belong and am free.

Words, the acid-bath of words.

…I once found a list of diseases as yet unclassified by medical science, and among these there occurred the word Islomania, which was described as a rare but by no means unknown affliction of spirit. There are people…who find islands somehow irresistible. The mere knowledge that they are on an island, a little world surrounded by the sea, fills them with an indescribable intoxication. These born “islomanes”…are direct descendents of the Atlanteans

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

Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.

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

He loved the desert because there the wind blew out one's footsteps like candle flames.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Any concentration of the will displaces life and gives it bias in motion. Reality, he believed, was always trying to copy the imagination of man, from which it derived.

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

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

The effective in art is what rapes the emotions of your audience without nourishing its values.

I have decided to leave Clea’s last letter un-answered. I no longer wish to coerce anyone, to make promises, to think of life in terms of compacts, resolutions, covenants. It will be up to Clea to interpret my silence according to her own needs and desires, to come to me if she has need or not, as the case may be. Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?

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.

If you have tendencies you've got to have scope

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

Each of our five senses contains an art.

after all the work of the philosophers on his soul and the doctors on his body, what can we really say we know about a man? That he is, when all is said and done, just a passage for liquids and solids, a pipe of flesh.

Não há múmias, pedaços de tecido colados ao osso, medas de sal ou cadáveres que jamais estivessem nem metade dos mortos que estamos hoje.

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

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.

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

Youth is the age of despairs.

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

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

He inhabits now that part of himself Which lay formerly desolate and uncolonised. - Mark of Patmos

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.

There is nothing stranger than to love somebody who is mad, or who is intermittently so. The weight, the strain, the anxiety is a heavy load to bear – if only because among these confusional states and hysterias loom dreadful probabilities like suicide or murder. It shakes one’s hold also on one’s own grasp of reality; one realises how precariously we manage

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

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.

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.

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؟

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.

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".

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.

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

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....

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.

All cultures seem to find a slightly alien local population to carry the Hermes projection. For the Vietnamese it is the Chinese, and for the Chinese it is the Japanese. For the Hindu it is the Moslem; for the North Pacific tribes it was the Chinook; in Latin America and in the American South it is the Yankee. In Uganda it is the East Indians and Pakistanis. In French Quebec it is the English. In Spain the Catalans are "the Jews of Spain". On Crete it is the Turks, and in Turkey it is the Armenians. Lawrence Durrell says that when he lived in Crete he was friends with the Greeks, but that when he wanted to buy some land they sent him to a Turk, saying that a Turk was what you needed for a trade, though of course he couldn't be trusted. This figure who is good with money but a little tricky is always treated as a foreigner even if his family has been around for centuries. Often he actually is a foreigner, of course. He is invited in when the nation needs trade and he is driven out - or murdered - when nationalism begins to flourish: the Chinese out of Vietnam in 1978, the Japanese out of China in 1949, the Jankees out of South America and Iran, the East Indians out of Uganda under Idi Amin, and the Armenians out of Turkey in 1915-16. The outsider is always used as a catalyst to arouse nationalism, and when times are hard he will always be its victim as well.