Lawrence Durrell Quotes

82 Sourced Quotes

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
Brazil is bigger than Europe, wilder than Africa, and weirder than Baffin Land.

Lawrence Durrell
I've always believed that our inventions mirror our secret wishes.

Lawrence Durrell
It's unthinkable not to love — you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin.

Lawrence Durrell
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
I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.

Lawrence Durrell
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
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
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
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
The confluent smallpox - invented perhaps as the cruellest remedy for human vanity

Lawrence Durrell
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
A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.

Lawrence Durrell
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.

Lawrence Durrell
Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.

Lawrence Durrell
I've alwayd believed that our inventions mirror our secret wishes.

Lawrence Durrell
It's only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness.

Lawrence Durrell
A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.

Lawrence Durrell
His profession [diplomacy] — offered him something like a long Jesuitical training in self-deception which enabled him to present an ever more highly polished surface to the world without deepening his human experience [-] for he lived surrounded by his ambitious and sycophantic fellows who taught him only how to excel in forms of address, and the elaborate kindnesses which, in pleasing, pave the way to advancement.

Lawrence Durrell
Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.

Lawrence Durrell
Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me, and then show me the place where he was hanged.

Lawrence Durrell
I love to feel events overlapping each other, crawling over one another like wet crabs in a basket.

Lawrence Durrell