Quotes from Lawrence Durrell

It was, if you like, the flirtation of minds prematurely exhausted by experience which seemed so much more dangerous than a love founded in sexual attraction.

First you have to know and understand intellectually what you want to do - then you have to sleepwalk a little to reach it.

There was some unresolved inner knot which she wished to untie and which was quite beyond my skill as a lover or a friend. Of course. Of course. I knew as much as could be known of the psychopathology of hysteria at that time.

There are some characters in this world who are marked down for self-destruction, and to these no amount of rational argument can appeal. For my part Justine always reminded me of a somnambulist discovered treading the perilous leads of a high tower; any attempt to wake her with a shout might lead to disaster. One could only follow her silently in the hope of guiding her gradually away from the great shadowy drops which loomed up on every side. But by some curious paradox it was these

There is never enough light." To which I responded without thought: "For women perhaps. We men are less exigent.

This is what is meant by possession - to be passionately at war for the qualities in one another to contend for the treasures of each other's personalities. But how can such a war be anything but destructive and hopeless?

She looked like a statue of pride hanging its head.

El dolor mismo es el único elemento de la memoria; porque el placer termina en sí mismo

Cuesta mucho luchar contra el deseo del corazón; todo lo que quiere obtener, lo compra al precio del alma.

This weird translation of feelings into gestures which belied words and words which belied gestures, confused and disoriented her. She needed someone to tell her whether to laugh or to cry.

Is it any wonder that I absent-mindedly take the entrance marked Aliens Only whenever I enter?

The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time. Lawrence Durrell in Clea, book three of the epic Alexandria Quartet - which I am reading for the third time since my early 20s...relishing its superb prose and enigmatic insights into the nature of love.

Slowly the bluish spring moon climbs the houses, sliding up the minarets into the clicking palm-trees, and with it the city seems to uncurl like some hibernating animal dug out of its winter earth, to stretch and begin to drink in the music of the three-day festival.

A good doctor, and in a special sense the psychologist, makes it quite deliberately, slightly harder for the patient to recover too easily. You do this to see if his psyche has any real bounce in it, for the secret of healing is in the patient and not the doctor.

With all its imperfections lying heavy on its head, I can't help being attached to it because in the writing of it I first heard the sound of my own voice, lame and halting perhaps, but nevertheless my very own. This is an experience no artist ever forgets —the birth cry of a newly born baby of letters, the genuine article.

Some characters in the world are marked down for self-destruction, and to these no amount of rational argument can appeal.

Landscape-tones: brown to bronze, steep skyline, low cloud, pearl ground with shadowed oyster and violet reflections. The lion-dust of desert: prophets' tombs turned to zinc and copper at sunset on the ancient lake.

and all at once it seemed that past and present had joined again without any divisions in it, and that all my memories and impressions had ordered themselves into one complete pattern whose metaphor was always the shining city of the disinherited — a city now trying softly to spread the sticky prismatic wings of a new-born dragonfly on the night.

No one thing can explain everything; though everything can illuminate something. God, I must be still drunk. If God were anything he would be an art. Sculpture or medicine. But the immense extension of knowledge in this our age, the growth of new sciences, makes it almost impossible for us to digest the available flavours and put them to use.

Let us go to bed together and ignore the loutish reality of the world.

man is only an extension of the spirit of place.

And morality is nothing if it is merely a form of good behavior.

One always falls in love with the love-choice of the person one loves.

The seeds of future events are carried within ourselves. They are implicit in us and unfold according to the laws of their own nature