"Southerners had a long tradition of looking for religious significance in even the most humble forms of nature, and I always preferred the explanations of folklore to the icy interpretations of science."
"There were far worse strategies in life than to try to make each aspect of one's existence a minor work of art."
"I felt the sharp sting of emptiness and solitude that you feel so acutely and with such internal sorrow and wonder whenever music is performed well."
"I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them."
"I cannot express how lordly and transfigured I felt at that moment. I was a prince of that harbor, a porpoise king - slim among the buoys and the water traffic."
"The only way I could endure being a coward was if I was the only one who knew it."
"He was ruled by the tyranny of instinct, by passion and the instant legislation of a simple heart."
"My memory often seems like a city of exiled poets afire with the astonishment of language, each believing in the integrity of his own witness, each with a separate version of culture and history, and the divine essential fire that is poetry itself."
"The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism."
"...I lived for those long casual walks down the beach and the sight of her small footprints in the glistening wet sand..."
"I had come to a place where I was meant to be. I don't mean anything so prosaic as a sense of coming home. This was different, very different. It was like arriving at a place much safer than home."
"There was always a grandeur and a nobility in my megalomania. And also something cheap and loathsome that I could not help."
"The Bear had once confided to me that Durrell's ego could fit snugly in the basilica of St. Peter's in Rome but in very few other public places. This runaway megalomania marked him as a blood member of the fraternity of generals. If looks alone could make generals, Durrell would have been a cinch. He was built lean and slim and dark, like a Doberman. A man of breeding and refrigerated intelligence, he ordered his life like a table of logarithms."
"Honor is the presence of God in man."
"The narrator analyzes that the maturing, passing away boy within him, "had issued me a challenge as he passed the baton to the man in me: He had challenged me to have the courage to become a gentle, harmless man."