Lawrence Durrell
42 quotes
Biography
Lawrence George Durrell was an expatriate British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer. He was the eldest brother of naturalist and writer Gerald Durrell.
"You see, nothing matters except pleasure - which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect."
"I suppose the secret of his success is in his tremendous idleness which almost approaches the supernatural."
"Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist."
"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."
"His [a terrorist's] primary objective is not battle. It is to bring down upon the community in general a reprisal for his wrongs, in the hope that the fury and resentment roused by punishment meted out to the innocent will gradually swell the ranks of those from whom he will draw further recruits."
"It's only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness."
"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."
"I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know."
"Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked."
"It's unthinkable not to love — you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin."
"The appalling thing is the degree of charity women are capable of. You see it all the time … love lavished on absolute fools. Love's a charity ward, you know."
"The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of Spring. A sky of hot nude pearl until midday, crickets in sheltered places, and now the wind unpacking the great planes, ransacking the great planes… I have escaped to this island with a few books and the child — Melissa’s child. I do not know why I use the word ‘escape’. The villagers say jokingly that only a sick man would choose such a remote place to rebuild. Well, then, I have come here to heal myself, if you like to put it that way…."
"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!"
"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."
"There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature."
"Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment; only there does its satisfaction lie."
"A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying."
"A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants."
"No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat."
"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 (I)"
"the confluent smallpox – invented perhaps as the cruellest remedy for human vanity (II)"
"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. (II)"
"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. (II)"
"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. (IV)"
"In French the truth of passion stood up coldly and cruelly to the scrutiny of human experience. In his own curious phrase he [Pursewarden] had always qualified it as 'an unsniggerable language'. (VIII)"