Quotes from Lawrence Durrell

I felt once more the strange equivocal power of the city—its flat alluvial landscape and exhausted airs… Alexandria; which is neither Greek, Syrian nor Egyptian, but a hybrid: a joint.

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

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 can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.

Now stiff on a pillar with a phallic air nelson stylites in Trafalgar square reminds the British what once they were.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Music is only love looking for words.

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

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.

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.