Quotes from Lawrence Durrell

The memory of man is as old as misfortune

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.

Music is only love looking for words.

I see artists as a great battalion moving through paint, words, music towards cosmological interpretation.

Poetry is what happens when an anxiety meets a technique.

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

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

Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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!

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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