Quotes from Lawrence Durrell

Loving is so much truer when sympathy, not desire, makes the match; for it leaves no wounds.

Idle to imagine falling in love as a correspondence of mind, of thoughts; it is the simultaneous firing of two spirits engaged in the autonomous act of growing up.

DüÅŸünürün görevi düÅŸünceler ileri sürmektir, oysa azizin iÅŸi susmak, bulduÄŸu ÅŸeyi söylememektir.

A city becomes a world when one loves its inhabitants.

The old love was slowly metamorphosed into admiration, just as his physical longing for her (so bitter at first) turned into a consuming and depersonalized tenderness which fed upon her absence instead of dying from it.

I suppose writers are cruel people. The dead do not care. It is the living who might be spared if we could quarry the message which lies buried in the heart of all human experience.

If you think of yourself as a sleeping city for example… what? You can sit quiet and hear the processes going on, going about their business; volition, desire, will, cognition, passion, conation.

Every variety of the name of flesh, old flesh quailing upon aged bones, or the unquenched flesh of boys and women on limbs infirm with the desires that could be represented in effigy but not be slaked except in mime — for they were desires engendered in the forests of the mind, belonging not to themselves but to remote ancestors speaking through them. Lust belongs to the egg and its seat is below the level of psyche.

Humility! The last trap that awaits the ego in search of absolute truth.

The cousin was made of different stuff; his biting air of laziness and superiority made one want to kick him.

In India when I was a boy they had great big green lizards there, and if you shouted or shot them their tails would fall off. There was only one boy in the school who could catch lizards intact. No one knew quite how he did it. He had a special soft way of going up to them, and he'd bring them back with their tails on. That strikes me as the best analogy I can give you. To try and catch your poem without its tail falling off.

How do you spell love in Alexandria?' he said at last, softly. 'That is the question. Sleeplessness, loneliness, bonheur, chagrin -- I do not want to harm or annoy her, but I feel that somehow, somewhere, she must need me as I need her.

When you are in love you know that love is a beggar, shameless as a beggar; and the responses of merely human pity can console one where love is absent by a false travesty of an imagined happiness.

this wonder of an Englishman who spoke indifferent but comprehensible Greek.… Before we parted he drew a

Tell me how she behaves and I will imitate her. In the dark we are all meat and treacherous however our hair kinks or skin smells. Tell me, and I will give you the wedding-smile and fall into your arms like a mountain of silk.

God's real and subtle nature must be clear of distinctions: a glass of spring-water, tasteless, odourless, merely refreshing: and surely its appeal would be to the few, the very few, real contemplatives?

This is nothing of medical interest — a small chill. Diseases are not interested in those who want to die.' And then with one of those characteristic swerves of association, like a swallow turning in mid-air she added, 'Oh! Nessim, I have always been so strong. Has it prevented me from being truly loved?

These are the moments which possess the writer, not the lover, and which live on perpetually. One can return to them time and time again in memory, or use them as a fund upon which to build the part of one's life which is writing. One can debauch them with words, but one cannot spoil them.

Of course, one must always remember that truth itself is always halved in utterance.

was horrified too at the banality of her dancing, which was bad beyond measure; yet watching her make those gentle and ineffectual movements of her slim hands and feet (the air of a gazelle harnessed to a water-wheel)

effect of place upon human temperaments.

A puritan culture's conception of art is something which will endorse its morality and flatter its patriotism. Nothing else.

I hunt everywhere for a life worth living. Perhaps if I could die or go mad it would provide a focus for all the feelings I have which find no proper outlet.

Of women, the most we can say, not being Frenchmen, is that they are burrowing animals.