Quotes from Lawrence Durrell

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.

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

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.

Words, the acid-bath of words.

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

i imagine therefore I belong and am free.

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.

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.

Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Each of our five senses contains an art.