Top 109 Quotes & Sayings by Lawrence Durrell

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

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.

Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.

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

History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.

Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.

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

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

I had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time - those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Truth disappears with the telling of it.

Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.

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

It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.

It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.

The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.

Music is only love looking for words.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

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

I imagine, therefore I belong and am free.

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

They say that if you get bored enough with calamity you can learn to laugh.

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

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.

Religion is simply art bastardized out of all recognition.

Whatever the heart desires, it purchases at the cost of soul

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.

Everything really desirable has come about because of, or in spite of, wine!

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

All culture corrupts, but French culture corrupts absolutely.

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.

Art like life is an open secret.

Life is like a cucumber. One minute it's in your hand, the next it's up you ass.

To be the equal of reality you must learn how to ignore it without danger.

It is the duty of every patriot to hate his country creatively.

I don’t believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he has not experienced.

I am quite alone. I am neither happy nor unhappy; I lie suspended like a hair or a feather in the cloudy mixtures of memory.

We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.

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

The national characteristics... the restless metaphysical curiosity, the tenderness of good living and the passionate individualism. This is the invisible constant in a place with which the ordinary tourist can get in touch just by sitting quite quietly over a glass of wine in a Paris bistro.

It is not peace we seek but meaning.

It only takes one match to ignite a haystack, or one remark to fire a mind.

Science is the poetry of the intellect and poetry the science of the heart's affections.

Every man is made of clay and diamond, and no woman can nourish both.

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

An idea is like a rare bird which cannot be seen. What one sees is the trembling of the branch it has just left.

…I once found a list of diseases as yet unclassified by medical science, and among these there occurred the word Islomania, which was described as a rare but by no means unknown affliction of spirit. There are people…who find islands somehow irresistible. The mere knowledge that they are on an island, a little world surrounded by the sea, fills them with an indescribable intoxication. These born “islomanes”…are direct descendents of the Atlanteans

Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine

Try and travel with the eyes of the spirit wide open, and not too much factual information. To tune in, without reverence, idly -- but with real inward attention. It is to be had for the feeling, that mysterious sense of rapport, of identity with the ground. You can extract the essence of a place once you know how. If you just get as still as a needle you'll be there.

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.

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

Truth is a woman. That is why it is enigmatic.

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

The whole Mediterranean, the sculpture, the palm, the gold beads, the bearded heroes, the wine, the ideas, the ships, the moonlight, the winged gorgons, the bronze men, the philosophers - all of it seems to rise in the sour, pungent taste of these black olives between the teeth. A taste older than meat, older than wine. A taste as old as cold water.

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.

I have decided to leave Clea’s last letter un-answered. I no longer wish to coerce anyone, to make promises, to think of life in terms of compacts, resolutions, covenants. It will be up to Clea to interpret my silence according to her own needs and desires, to come to me if she has need or not, as the case may be. Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?