Quotes by Lawrence Durrell

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

“Music is only love looking for words.”

“And I saw her as a sad thirtieth child of Valentine that fell, not as Lucifer rebelling against God, but because she too passionately wanted to be united with him! All things in excess become sin.”

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

“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 do the ordinary people, but to fulfill it in i...”

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

“Underneath an artist's preoccupations with sex, society, religion, etc. (all the staple abstractions that allow the forebrain to chatter) there is a soul tortured beyond endurance by the lack of te...”

“Artthe 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.”

“Art like life is an open secret.”

“Each of our five senses contains an art.”

“I dont believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he has not experienced.”

“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. God made eter...”

“... history - the lamp which illumines national character...”

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

“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 nos...”

“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... For fro...”

“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. They flower spontaneously...”

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

“Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?”

“Bessie was News, Leaders, and Gossip; Enid was Features, Make-up and general Sub. Whenever they were at a loss for copy they would mercilessly pillage ancient copies of Punch or Home Chat. An occas...”