Lawrence Durrell Quotes

82 Sourced Quotes

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
I return link by link along the iron chains of memory to the city which we inhabited so briefly together: the city which used us as its flora-precipitated in us conflicts which were hers and which we mistook for our own: beloved Alexandria!

Lawrence Durrell
The Copts — the only branch of the Christian Church which was thoroughly integrated into the Orient! But then your good Bishop of Salisbury openly said he considered these oriental Christians as worse than infidels, and your Crusaders massacred them joyfully.

Lawrence Durrell
Any concentration of the will displaces life and gives it bias in motion. Reality, he believed, was always trying to copy the imagination of man, from which it derived.

Lawrence Durrell
Here was Kenilworth now heading the new department concerned with Personnel [-] one of those blank administrative constructs which offered no openings into the world of policy. A dead end. [-] he would soon develop the negative powers of obstruction which always derive from a sense of failure.

Lawrence Durrell
No history much? Perhaps. Only this ominous
Dark beauty flowering under veils,
Trapped in the spectrum of a dying style:
A village like an instinct left to rust,
Composed around the echo of a pistol-shot.

Lawrence Durrell
Shyness has laws you can only give yourself; tragically to those who least understand.

Lawrence Durrell
Lovers can find nothing to say to each other that has not been said and unsaid a thousand times over. Kisses were invented to translate such nothings into wounds

Lawrence Durrell
After all the work of the philosophers on his soul and the doctors on his body, what can we really say we know about a man? That he is, when all is said and done, just a passage for liquids and solids, a pipe of flesh.

Lawrence Durrell
We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.

Lawrence Durrell
I think often, and never without a certain fear of Nessim's love for Justine. [-] It coloured his unhappiness with a kind of ecstasy [-] Yet one touch of humour would have saved him from such dreadful comprehensive suffering.

Lawrence Durrell
I am just a refugee from the long slow toothache of English life. It is terrible to love life so much you can hardly breathe!

Lawrence Durrell
She took kisses like so many coats of paint […] how long and how vainly I searched for excuses which might make her amorality if not palatable at lest understandable. I realize now the time I wasted in this way; instead of enjoying her and turning aside from these preoccupations with the thought, 'She is untrustworthy as she is beautiful. She takes love as plants do water, lightly, thoughtlessly.

Lawrence Durrell
Somewhere in the heart of experience there is an order and a coherence which we might purprise if we were attentive enough, loving enough, or patient enough.

Lawrence Durrell
Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.

Lawrence Durrell
Science is the poetry of the intellect and poetry the science of the heart's affections.

Lawrence Durrell
He had at last discovered that love had no pith in it, and that the projection of one own's feelings upon the images of a beloved was in the long run, an act of self-mutilation.

Lawrence Durrell
The art of prose governed by syncopated thinking; for thoughts curdle in the heart if not expressed. An idea is like a rare bird which cannot be seen. What one sees is the trembling of the branch it has just left.

Lawrence Durrell
The realisation of one's own death is the point at which one becomes adult.

Lawrence Durrell
From among many sorts of failure each selects the one which least compromises his self respect, which lets him down the lightest.

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

Lawrence Durrell
Subconsciously he knew too, that the oriental woman is not a sensualist in the European sense; there is nothing mawkish in her constitution. Her true obsessions are power, politics and possessions - however much she might deny it. The sex ticks on in the mind, but its motions are warmed by the kinetic brutalities of money.

Lawrence Durrell
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.

Lawrence Durrell
A diary is the last place to go if you wish to seek the truth about a person. Nobody dares to make the final confession to themselves on paper: or at least, not about love.

Lawrence Durrell
He thought and suffered a good deal but he lacked the resolution to dare—the first requisite of a practitioner.

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

Lawrence Durrell
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.

Lawrence Durrell
The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.

Lawrence Durrell
We live" writes Pursewarden somewhere, "lives based upon selected fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time - not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed.

Lawrence Durrell