Quotes from Lawrence Durrell

Yes, one day I found myself writing down with trembing fingers the four words with which every story-teller since the world began has staked his slender claim to the attention of his fellow-men. Words which presage simply the old story of an artist coming of age. I wrote: 'Once upon a time...

with its head under its wing. I was so sorry, yet so glad. 'For us, the living, the problem is of a totally different order: how to harness time in the cultivation of a style of heart — something like that?

It was already dark and the city was drifting like a bed of seaweed towards the lighted cafés of the upper town.

In her there was a pliancy, a resilience which was Oriental — a passion to serve.

God neither created us nor wished us to be created, but that we are the work of an inferior deity, a Demiurge, who wrongly believed himself to be God? Heavens, how probable it seems; and this overweening hubris has been handed on down to our children.

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.

The slither of tyres across the waves of the desert under a sky blue and frost-bound in winter; or in summer a fearful lunar bombardment which turned the sea to phosphorus — bodies shining like tin, crushed in electric bubbles; or walking to the last spit of sand near Montaza, sneaking through the dense green darkness of the King's gardens, past the drowsy sentry, to where the force of the sea was suddenly crippled and the waves hobbled over the sand-bar. Or

Cheer up, me boyo, it takes a lifetime to grow. People haven't the patience any more.

think she was also thinking, perhaps, of Justine, up there in the big house among the tall candles and the oil-paintings by forgotten masters.

Conversely the British saw a one-dimensional figure in the Cypriot; they did not realize how richly the landscape was stocked with the very sort of characters who rejoice the English heart in a small country town—the rogue, the drunkard, the singer, the incorrigible.

paederasty is somehow no qualification of

And Melissa would giggle and turn away as we walked to watch the minarets glisten like pearls upon the morning light and the bright children's kites take the harbour wind.

Perhaps language was the key—it was hard to say. Certainly I was astonished to find how few Cypriots knew good English, and how few Englishmen the dozen words of Greek which cement friendships and lighten the burdens of everyday life.

Life, the raw material, is only lived in potentia until the artist deploys it in his work.

Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine

Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.

I imagine, therefore I belong and am free.

I had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time - those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything.

The appalling thing is the degree of charity women are capable of. You see it all the time... love lavished on absolute fools. Love's a charity ward, you know.

Sorrow is implicit in love as gravitation is implicit in mass.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential - the imagination.

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

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.

Love is like trench warfare - you cannot see the enemy, but you know he is there and that it is wiser to keep your head down.