Lawrence Durrell

“It is hard to fight with one's heart's desires; whatever it wishes to get, it purchases at the cost of the soul.”

“Her efforts to achieve herself had led her always towards, and not away from him.”

“He loved the desert because there the wind blew out one's footsteps like candle flames.”

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

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

“One word ‘love’ has to do service for so many different kinds of the same animal.”

“Balthazar sighed and said "Truth naked and unashamed. That's a splendid phrase. But we always see her as she seems, never as she is. Each man has his own interpretation.”

“We live" writes Pursewarden somewhere, "lives based upon selected fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time - not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed.”

“But I love to feel events overlapping each other, crawling over one another like wet crabs in a basket”

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

“Poverty is a great cutter-off and riches a great shutter-off.”

“If you have tendencies you've got to have scope”

“We should tackle reality in a slightly jokey way, otherwise we miss its point.”

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

“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.”

“I am just a refugee from the long slow toothache of English life. It is terrible to love life so much you can hardly breathe!”

“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.”

“Odd, isn't it? He really was the right man for her in a sort of way; but then as you know, it is a law of love that the so-called 'right' person always comes to soon or too late.”

“The loved object is simply one that has shared an experience at the same moment of time, narcissistically; and the desire to be near the beloved object is at first not due to the idea of possessing it, but simply to let the two experiences compare themselves, like reflections in different mirrors. All this may precede the first look, kiss, or touch; precede ambition, pride, or envy; precede the first declarations which mark the turning point—for from here love degenerates into habit, possession, and back to loneliness.”

“Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.”

“What do you believe? You never say anything. At the most you sometimes laugh.”

“You see, nothing matters except pleasure - which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.”

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

“Music is only love looking for words.”

“Sorrow is implicit in love as gravitation is implicit in mass.”

“The realisation of one's own death is the point at which one becomes adult.”

“Frost in January minus 20 for a week. Dead birds frozen on the branch—they fall with the first thaw like ripe fruit—death-ripened. We shall all end like them—just a stain in the snow.”

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

“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?”

“I suppose the secret of his success is in his tremendous idleness which almost approaches the supernatural.”

“Words, the acid-bath of words.”

“Any concentration of the will displaces life and gives it bias in motion. Reality, he believed, was always trying to copy the imagination of man, from which it derived.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“i imagine therefore I belong and am free.”

“The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you...”

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

“Art like life is an open secret.”

“Gamblers and lovers really play to lose.”

“It is a pity indeed to travel and not get this essential sense of landscape values. You do not need a sixth sense for it. It is there if you just close your eyes and breathe softly through your nose; you will hear the whispered message, for all landscapes ask the same question in the same whisper. 'I am watching you -- are you watching yourself in me?' Most travelers hurry too much...the great thing is to try and travel with the eyes of the spirit wide open, and not to much factual information. To tune in, without reverence, idly -- but with real inward attention. It is to be had for the feeling...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.”

“The world is like a cucumber—today it's in your hand, tomorrow up your arse.”

“Art—the meaning of the pattern of our common actions in reality. The cloth-of-gold that hides behind the sackcloth of reality, forced out by the pain of human memory.”

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

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

“Não há múmias, pedaços de tecido colados ao osso, medas de sal ou cadáveres que jamais estivessem nem metade dos mortos que estamos hoje.”

“He hablado de la inutilidad del arte, pero no he dicho la verdad sobre el consuelo que procura.”

“He thought and suffered a good deal but he lacked the resolution to dare--the first requisite of a practitioner.”