Lawrence Durrell Quotes
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All culture corrupts, but French culture corrupts absolutely.
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A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.
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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!
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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.
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Brazil is bigger than Europe, wilder than Africa, and weirder than Baffin Land.
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We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it.
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A critic is a lug-worm in the liver of literature.
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Love joins and then divides. How else would we be growing?
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Everything really desirable has come about because of, or in spite of, wine!
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Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.
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A taste older than meat, older than wine. A taste as old as cold water.
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Shyness has laws you can only give yourself; tragically to those who least understand.
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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.
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Art like life is an open secret.
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Music is only love looking for words.
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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.
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What are stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?
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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.
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Sorrow is implicit in love as gravitation is implicit in mass.
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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?
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The effective in art is what rapes the emotions of your audience without nourishing its values.
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The steward, according to custom, had stopped all the clocks. This, in the language of Narouz, said "Your stay with us is so brief, let us not be reminded of the flight of the hours."
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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.
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Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine
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Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.
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Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.
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Religion is simply art bastardized out of all recognition.
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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
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Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?
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The realisation of one's own death is the point at which one becomes adult.
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