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Lawrence Durrell
33 quotes
“Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.”
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) first seen 1948 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Henry Miller, 1948
“Brazil is bigger than Europe, wilder than Africa, and weirder than Baffin Land.”
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) first seen 1935 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Henry Miller, December 1948. In Durrell-Miller Letters, 1935-1980, p. 227.
“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.”
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) first seen 1957 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Bitter Lemons (1957)
“It's only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness.”
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview in Writers at Work, Second Series, ed. George Plimpton (1963)
“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.”
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: About the pre-WWII days in Kalami on Corfu (1975), as quoted in Amateurs in Eden (2011) by Joanna Hodgkin, p. 6
“I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.”
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview in the Sunday Times, 1988
“Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.”
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview in the Sunday Times, 1988
“It's unthinkable not to love — you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin.”
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview in The Observer, 1990
“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.”
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview in The Observer, 1990
“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….”
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1912–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1912–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I remember Nessim once saying [-] that Alexandria was the great winepress of love; those who emerged from it were the sick men, the solitaries, the prophets — I mean all who have been deeply wounded in their sex.”
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1912–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1912–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment; only there does its satisfaction lie.”
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.”
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.”
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.”
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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)”
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“the confluent smallpox – invented perhaps as the cruellest remedy for human vanity (II)”
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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)”
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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)”
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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)”
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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)”
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Copts — the only branch of the Christian Church which was thoroughly integrated into the Orient! But then your good Bishop of Salisbury openly said he considered these oriental Christians as worse than infidels, and your Crusaders massacred them joyfully.”
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Subconsciously he knew too, that the oriental woman is not a sensualist in the European sense; there is nothing mawkish in her constitution. Her true obsessions are power, politics and possessions - however much she might deny it. The sex ticks on in the mind, but its motions are warmed by the kinetic brutalities of money. (X)”
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.”
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.”
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He had at last discovered that love had no pith in it, and that the projection of one own's feelings upon the images of a beloved was in the long run, an act of self-mutilation.”
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The art of prose governed by syncopated thinking; for thoughts curdle in the heart if not expressed. An idea is like a rare bird which cannot be seen. What one sees is the trembling of the branch it has just left.”
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source