Lawrence Durrell Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.

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.

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

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

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

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

Music is only love looking for words.

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

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

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

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

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

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.

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

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

Truth disappears with the telling of it.

A city becomes a world when one loves one of it`s inhabitants.

I imagine, therefore I belong and am free.

It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.

They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures - and the best of them lead us not only outward in space, but inward as well.