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Lawrence Durrell Quotes
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It is the duty of every patriot to hate his country creatively.
Lawrence Durrell
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The artist's work constitutes the only satisfactory relationship he can have with his fellow men since he seeks his real friends among the dead and the unborn.
Lawrence Durrell
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Truth is a matter of direct apprehension-you can't climb a ladder of mental concepts to it.
Lawrence Durrell
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Let us define 'man' as a poet perpetually conspiring against himself.
Lawrence Durrell
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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
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A taste older than meat, older than wine. A taste as old as cold water.
Lawrence Durrell
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Of women, the most we can say, not being Frenchmen, is that they are burrowing animals.
Lawrence Durrell
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Shyness has laws you can only give yourself; tragically to those who least understand.
Lawrence Durrell
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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
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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
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We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.
Lawrence Durrell
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.
Lawrence Durrell
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Science is the poetry of the intellect and poetry the science of the heart's affections.
Lawrence Durrell
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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
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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
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The realisation of one's own death is the point at which one becomes adult.
Lawrence Durrell
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Quote of the day
Be a sinner and sin strongly, but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ.
Martin Luther
Lawrence Durrell
Born:
February 27, 1912
Died:
November 7, 1990
(aged 78)
Bio:
Lawrence George Durrell was an expatriate British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer.
Known for:
Justine (1957)
Mountolive (1958)
Balthazar (1958)
The Black Book (1938)
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