Lawrence Durrell Quotes

82 Sourced Quotes

There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.

Lawrence Durrell
Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Lawrence Durrell
How grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work.

Lawrence Durrell
It only takes one match to ignite a haystack, or one remark to fire a mind.

Lawrence Durrell
To write a poem is like trying to catch a lizard without its tail falling off.

Lawrence Durrell
It is the duty of every patriot to hate his country creatively.

Lawrence Durrell
Let us define 'man' as a poet perpetually conspiring against himself.

Lawrence Durrell
They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures - and the best of them lead us not only outward in space, but inward as well.

Lawrence Durrell
A taste older than meat, older than wine. A taste as old as cold water.

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

Lawrence Durrell
Truth is a matter of direct apprehension-you can't climb a ladder of mental concepts to it.

Lawrence Durrell
Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.

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

Lawrence Durrell
I felt once more the strange equivocal power of the city—its flat alluvial landscape and exhausted airs... Alexandria; which is neither Greek, Syrian nor Egyptian, but a hybrid: a joint.

Lawrence Durrell
Now stiff on a pillar with a phallic air nelson stylites in Trafalgar square reminds the British what once they were.

Lawrence Durrell
Everything really desirable has come about because of, or in spite of, wine!

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

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

Lawrence Durrell
No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.

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

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

Lawrence Durrell
I have been thinking about the girl I met last night in the mirror: dark on the marble-ivory white: glossy black hair: deep suspiring eyes in which one's glances sink because they are nervous, curious, turned to sexual curiosity.

Lawrence Durrell
The steward, according to custom, had stopped all the clocks. This, in the language of Narouz, said, "Your stay with us is so brief, let us not be reminded of the flight of the hours. God made eternity. Let us escape from the despotism of time altogether." These ancient and hereditary politenesses filled Nessim with emotion.

Lawrence Durrell
The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you...

Lawrence Durrell
People only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it.

Lawrence Durrell
All artists today are expected to cultivate a little fashionable unhappiness.

Lawrence Durrell
Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?

Lawrence Durrell
Odd, isn't it? He really was the right man for her in a sort of way; but then as you know, it is a law of love that the so-called 'right' person always comes to soon or too late.

Lawrence Durrell
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.

Lawrence Durrell
In French the truth of passion stood up coldly and cruelly to the scrutiny of human experience. In his own curious phrase he [Pursewarden] had always qualified it as 'an unsniggerable language'.

Lawrence Durrell