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From among many sorts of failure each selects the one which least compromises his self respect, which lets him down the lightest.
Lawrence Durrell
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Life, the raw material, is only lived in potentia until the artist deploys it in his work.
Lawrence Durrell
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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
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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
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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
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He thought and suffered a good deal but he lacked the resolution to dare—the first requisite of a practitioner.
Lawrence Durrell
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Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine
Lawrence Durrell
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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
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The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.
Lawrence Durrell
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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
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I remember Nessim once saying [-] that Alexandria was the great winepress of love; those who emerged from it were the sick men, the solitaries, the prophets-I mean all who have been deeply wounded in their sex.
Lawrence Durrell
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Brazil is bigger than Europe, wilder than Africa, and weirder than Baffin Land.
Lawrence Durrell
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I've always believed that our inventions mirror our secret wishes.
Lawrence Durrell
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It's unthinkable not to love — you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin.
Lawrence Durrell
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That house with its remoteness and the islands going down like soft gongs all the time into the amazing blue, and I shall never, never ever forget a youth spent there, discovered by accident. It was pure gold. But then of course... youth does mean happiness, it does mean love, and that's something you can't get over.
Lawrence Durrell
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I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.
Lawrence Durrell
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Very few people realise that sex is a psychic and not a physical act. The clumsy coupling of human beings is simply a biological paraphrase of this truth - a primitive method of introducing minds to each other, engaging them. But most people are stuck in the physical aspect, unaware of the poetic rapport which it so clumsily tries to teach.
Lawrence Durrell
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There is no pain compared to that of loving a woman who makes her body accessible to one and yet who is incapable of delivering her true self — because she does not know where to find it.
Lawrence Durrell
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I have done so many things in my life," she said to the mirror. "Evil things, perhaps. But never unattentively, never wastefully...was I wrong?
Lawrence Durrell
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Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.
Lawrence Durrell
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The confluent smallpox - invented perhaps as the cruellest remedy for human vanity
Lawrence Durrell
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So the riders of the darkness pass On their circuit: the luminous island Of the self trembles and waits, Waits for us all, my friends, Where the sea's big brush recolors The dying lives, and the unborn smiles.
Lawrence Durrell
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A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.
Lawrence Durrell
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Then he saw that she was blind, her face slightly upcast to her companion's in the manner of those whose expressions never fully attain their target - the eyes of another.
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Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.
Lawrence Durrell
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
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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