Lawrence Durrell

“Youth is the age of despairs.”

— Lawrence Durrell

“Words, the acid-bath of words.”

— Lawrence Durrell

“She looked like a statue of pride hanging its head.”

— Lawrence Durrell

Truth is a woman. That is why it is enigmatic.

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

The memory of man is as old as misfortune

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

Shyness has laws you can only give yourself; tragically to those who least understand.

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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.…

— Lawrence Durrell

“God’s real and subtle nature must be clear of distinctions: a glass of spring-water, tasteless, odourless, merely refreshing: and surely its appeal…

— Lawrence Durrell

Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we…

— Lawrence Durrell

The cocktail party - as the name itself indicates - was originally invented by dogs. They are simply bottom-sniffings raised to the…

— Lawrence Durrell

Odd, isn't it? He really was the right man for her in a sort of way; but then as you know, it…

— Lawrence Durrell

I have done so many things in my life," she said to the mirror. "Evil things, perhaps. But never unattentively, never wastefully...was…

— Lawrence Durrell

“I meant of course the whole portentous scrimmage of sex itself, the act of penetration which could lead a man to despair…

— Lawrence Durrell

“One night he woke to the soughing of great wings and saw a bat-like creature with the head of a violin resting…

— Lawrence Durrell

“I suppose events are simply a sort of annotation of our feelings--the one might be deduced from the other. Time carries us…

— Lawrence Durrell

I have decided to leave Clea’s last letter un-answered. I no longer wish to coerce anyone, to make promises, to think of…

— Lawrence Durrell

“The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time." Lawrence Durrell in "Clea," book three of the epic Alexandria…

— Lawrence Durrell

“No one thing can explain everything; though everything can illuminate something. God, I must be still drunk. If God were anything he…

— Lawrence Durrell

“If you are born of the artist tribe it is a waste of time to try and function as a priest. You…

— Lawrence Durrell

Try and travel with the eyes of the spirit wide open, and not too much factual information. To tune in, without reverence,…

— Lawrence Durrell

“He would wake to see the towers and minarets printed on the exhausted, dust-powdered sky, and see as if en montage on…

— Lawrence Durrell

The national characteristics... the restless metaphysical curiosity, the tenderness of good living and the passionate individualism. This is the invisible constant in…

— Lawrence Durrell

“Suddenly at the end of the great couloir my vision is sharpened by a pale disjunctive shudder as a bar of buttercup-yellow…

— Lawrence Durrell

“Africa, which they had somehow visualized as an extension of Europe -- an extension of terms, of references to a definitive past…

— Lawrence Durrell

“The oranges were more plentiful than usual that year. They glowed in their arbours of burnished green leaf like lanterns, flickering up…

— Lawrence Durrell

“It is a pity indeed to travel and not get this essential sense of landscape values. You do not need a sixth…

— Lawrence Durrell

“It was cold in the street and I crossed to the lighted blaze of shops in Rue Fuad. In a grocer’s window…

— Lawrence Durrell

The loved object is simply one that has shared an experience at the same moment of time, narcissistically; and the desire to…

— Lawrence Durrell

“Idle, she writes, to imagine falling in love as a correspondence of minds, of thoughts,; it is a simultaneous firing of two…

— Lawrence Durrell

“In these days Melissa's absorbed and provoking gentleness had all the qualities of a rediscovered youth. Her long uncertain fingers - I…

— Lawrence Durrell