Best 102 quotes of Lawrence Durrell on MyQuotes

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

A critic is a lug-worm in the liver of literature.

A diary is the last place to go if you wish to seek the truth about a person. Nobody dares to make the final confession to themselves on paper: or at least, not about love.

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.

All artists today are expected to cultivate a little fashionable unhappiness.

All culture corrupts, but French culture corrupts absolutely.

Art like life is an open secret.

A taste older than meat, older than wine. A taste as old as cold water.

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

Brazil is bigger than Europe, wilder than Africa, and weirder than Baffin Land.

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

Comedians are the nearest to suicide.

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

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

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.

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.

Gamblers and lovers really play to lose.

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

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

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

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!

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.

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 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.

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.

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

…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

I see artists as a great battalion moving through paint, words, music towards cosmological interpretation.

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

It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.

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

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

It’s only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness.

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

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.

Let us define 'man' as a poet perpetually conspiring against himself.

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

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

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

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

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.

Love joins and then divides. How else would we be growing?

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

Music is only love looking for words.

No history much? Perhaps. Only this ominous Dark beauty flowering under veils, Trapped in the spectrum of a dying style: A village like an instinct left to rust, Composed around the echo of a pistol-shot.

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

Now stiff on a pillar with a phallic air nelson stylites in Trafalgar square reminds the British what once they were.

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.