Lawrence Durrell Quotes

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

~ Lawrence Durrell

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

~ Lawrence Durrell

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.

~ Lawrence Durrell

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

~ Lawrence Durrell

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.

~ Lawrence Durrell

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.

~ Lawrence Durrell

Art like life is an open secret.

~ Lawrence Durrell

Each of our five senses contains an art.

~ Lawrence Durrell

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.

~ Lawrence Durrell

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

~ Lawrence Durrell

Music is only love looking for words.

~ Lawrence Durrell

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.

~ Lawrence Durrell

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

~ Lawrence Durrell

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.

~ Lawrence Durrell

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

~ Lawrence Durrell

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.

~ Lawrence Durrell

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....

~ Lawrence Durrell

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

~ Lawrence Durrell

Bessie was News, Leaders, and Gossip; Enid was Features, Make-up and general Sub. Whenever they were at a loss for copy they would mercilessly pillage ancient copies of Punch or Home Chat. An occasional hole in the copy was filled with a ghoulish smudge - local block-making had clearly indicated that somewhere a poker-work fanatic had gone quietly out of his mind. In this way the Central Balkan Herald was made up every morning and then delivered to the composition room where the chain-gang quickly reduced it to gibberish. MINISTER FINED FOR KISSING IN PUBIC. WEDDING BULLS RING OUT FOR PRINCESS. QUEEN OF HOLLAND GIVES PANTY FOR EX-SERVICE MEN. MORE DOGS HAVE BABIES THIS SUMMER IN BELGRADE. BRITAINS NEW FLYING-GOAT.

~ Lawrence Durrell

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.

~ Lawrence Durrell

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

~ Lawrence Durrell

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

~ Lawrence Durrell

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

~ Lawrence Durrell

Love is poetry plus biology.

~ Lawrence Durrell

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

~ Lawrence Durrell

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

~ Lawrence Durrell

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

~ Lawrence Durrell

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.

~ Lawrence Durrell

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

~ Lawrence Durrell

Truth disappears with the telling of it.

~ Lawrence Durrell

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

~ Lawrence Durrell

It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.

~ Lawrence Durrell

I imagine, therefore I belong and am free.

~ Lawrence Durrell

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

~ Lawrence Durrell