Quotes from Lawrence Durrell

For all drama creates bondage, and the actor is only significant to the degree that he is bound.

My friends must all have known all along. Yet nobody breathed a word. But of course, the truth is that nobody ever does breathe a word, nobody interferes, nobody whispers while the acrobat is on the tight-rope; they just sit and watch the spectacle, waiting only to be wise after the event.

In marriage they legitimized despair," and "Every kiss is the conquest of a repulsion.

she had been raped by one of her relations. One cannot help smiling at the commonplaceness of the thought.

The lion-dust of desert: prophets' tombs turned to zinc and copper at sunset on the ancient lake.

Basle, Zurich, Baden, Paris — the flickering of steel rails over the arterial systems of Europe's body: steel ganglia meeting and dividing away across mountains and valleys.

Other countries may offer you discoveries in manners or lore or landscape; Greece offers you something harder—the discovery of yourself.

But then is not life itself a fairy-tale which we lose the power of apprehending as we grow? No matter.

I imagine, therefore I belong and am free".' Of

We were like mourners at an invisible cenotaph during the two minutes' silence which commemorates an irremediable failure of the human will.

Nature had combined in him the features of a degenerate pope and the torpor of a crocodile, and to these had added a voice of unconscionable harshness.

A novel should be an act of divination by entrails, not a careful record of a game of pat-ball on some vicarage lawn!

Even "time is money" comes into the picture; and then, if you think that money is excrement for the Freudian, you understand that time must be also!

This world represents the promise of a unique happiness which we are not well-enough equipped to grasp.

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 kind, dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean.

One learns nothing from those who return our love.

Death and life are both simply the hazards of a chance which cannot be averted

How difficult it is to analyse these relationships which lie under the mere skin of our actions; for loving is only a sort of skin-language, sex a terminology merely.

Two things spread quickly: gossip and a forest fire"—Cypriot proverb.) I

if you intend to try and work, not to sit under the Tree of Idleness.

There is always a philosophy behind the misadventures of men, even if they are unaware of it.' And

These notes, however they may be read, are intended only as a painstaking affectionate commentary on a world into which I have been born to share my most solitary moments — those of coitus — with Justine. I can get no nearer to the truth.

the indifference of the natural world to the constructions of art

Never to imagine that any of these generalizations we make about gods or men is valid, but to cherish them because they carry in them the fallibility of our own minds.