Quotes from Lawrence Durrell

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

If you have tendencies you've got to have scope

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'.*

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.

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

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

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

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

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....

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

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

Youth is the age of despairs.

God did not create us, nor did He wish us to be created. We are the work of a lesser deity, a demiurge, who wrongly believed himself to be God.

But there are more than five sexes and only demotic Greek seems to distinguish among them.

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.

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.

Grapes from this mountain region yield a wine that bubbles ever so slightly; an undertone of sulphur and rock. Ask for red wine at Lakones and they will bring you a glass of volcano's blood.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

we who have travelled much and loved much: we who have -- I will not say suffered for we have always recognized through suffering our own self-sufficiency -- only we appreciate the complexities of tenderness, and understand how narrowly love and friendship are related