Lawrence Durrell - Justine (1957)

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There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.

Lawrence Durrell
All artists today are expected to cultivate a little fashionable unhappiness.

Lawrence Durrell
The cocktail party - as the name itself indicates - was originally invented by dogs. They are simply bottom-sniffings raised to the rank of formal ceremonies.

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

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
Our common actions in reality are simply the sackcloth covering which hides the cloth-of-gold - the meaning of the pattern. For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential—the imagination.

Lawrence Durrell
I felt once more the strange equivocal power of the city—its flat alluvial landscape and exhausted airs... Alexandria; which is neither Greek, Syrian nor Egyptian, but a hybrid: a joint.

Lawrence Durrell
Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment; only there does its satisfaction lie.

Lawrence Durrell
How grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work.

Lawrence Durrell
These are the moments which are not calculable, and cannot be assessed in words; they live on in the solution of memory, like wonderful creatures, unique of their own kind, dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean.

Lawrence Durrell
We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it.

Lawrence Durrell
I have been thinking about the girl I met last night in the mirror: dark on the marble-ivory white: glossy black hair: deep suspiring eyes in which one's glances sink because they are nervous, curious, turned to sexual curiosity.

Lawrence Durrell
People only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it.

Lawrence Durrell
Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?

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

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

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

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

Lawrence Durrell