Lawrence Durrell - Balthazar (1958)

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

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

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
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