Quotes from Lawrence Durrell

One night he woke to the soughing of great wings and saw a bat-like creature with the head of a violin resting upon the bedrail.

Ancient lands, in all their prehistoric intactness: lake-solitudes hardly brushed by the hurrying feet of the centuries where the uninterrupted pedigrees of pelican and ibis and heron evolve their slow destinies in complete seclusion.

He would wake to see the towers and minarets printed on the exhausted, dust-powdered sky, and see as if en montage on them the giant footprints of the historical memory which lies behind the recollections of individual personality, its mentor and guide: indeed its inventor, since man is only an extension of the spirit of place.

In the great quietness of these winter evenings there is one clock: the sea. Its dim momentum in the mind is the fugue upon which this writing is made. Empty cadences of sea-water licking its own wounds, sulking along the mouths of the delta, boiling upon those deserted beaches– empty, forever empty under the gulls: white scribble on the grey, munched by clouds.

In marriage they legitimized despair; every kiss is the conquest of a repulsion.

He felt that his mind had become a battle-ground for the forces of good and evil and that his task was to strain every nerve to recognize them, but it was not easy.

The great prayer wound its way into my sleepy consciousness like a serpent, coil after shining coil of words—the voice of the muezzin sinking from register to register of gravity—until the whole morning seemed dense with its marvelous healing powers, the intimations of a grace undeserved and unexpected, impregnating that shabby room where Melissa lay, breathing lightly as a gull, rocked upon the oceanic splendours of a language she would never know.

There are two positions available to us – either crime which renders us happy, or the noose, which prevents us from being unhappy.

in the huge gaunt ballroom where the palms splintered themselves in the shivering mirrors: leaking through the windows to where the moonlight waited patiently among the deserted public gardens and highways, troubling the uneasy water of the outer harbour

La culpa se apresura siempre hacia su complemento, el castigo, y sólo allí encuentra satisfacción.

Its women shall be the voluptuaries not of pleasure but of pain, doomed to hunt for what they least dare to find.

If things were always what they seemed, how impoverished would be the imagination of man!

Yet the presence of death always refreshes experience thus--that is its function: to help us deliberate on the novelty of time.

These are not, you see, the sort of distinctions of which women are usually capable.

I return, link by link, along the iron chains of memory.

He always puzzled me —except when I had him in my arms.

I long to be musical in body and mind. I want style, consort. Not the little mental squirts as if through the ticker-tape of the mind.

To these internal pressures we are gracefully adding by direct encouragement, the rigour of a nationalism based in a fanatical religion. I personally admire it, but never forget that it is a fighting religion with no metaphysics, only an ethic.

Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me and then show me the place where he was hanged.

Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment: only there does its satisfaction lie.

am recalling now how during that last spring (forever) we walked together at full moon, overcome by the soft dazed air of the city, the quiet ablutions of water and moonlight that polished it like a great casket. An aerial lunacy among the deserted trees of the dark squares, and the long dusty roads reaching away from midnight to midnight, bluer than oxygen.

Our common actions in reality are simply the sackcloth covering which hides the cloth-of-gold—the meaning of the pattern.

We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it.

I suppose events are simply a sort of annotation of our feelings--the one might be deduced from the other. Time carries us (boldly imagining that we are discrete ego's modeling our own personal futures)--time carries us forward by the momentum of those feelings inside us of which we ourselves are least conscious.