Lawrence Durrell Quotes

99 quotes in 1243 categories

• Everything really desirable has come about because of, or in spite of, wine!
• Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.
• Shyness has laws you can only give yourself; tragically to those who least understand.
• No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.
• 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…
• It is not peace we seek but meaning.
• 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…
• Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment: only there does its satisfaction lie.
• It's unthinkable not to love -you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin.
• The national characteristics... the restless metaphysical curiosity, the tenderness of good living and the passionate individualism. This is the invisible constant in a place with…
• Now stiff on a pillar with a phallic air nelson stylites in Trafalgar square reminds the British what once they were.
• Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.
• Life is like a cucumber. One minute it's in your hand, the next it's up you ass.
• Very few people realise that sex is a psychic and not a physical act. The clumsy coupling of human beings is simply a biological paraphrase…
• Poverty is a great cutter-off and riches a great shutter-off.
• But I love to feel events overlapping each other, crawling over one another like wet crabs in a basket
• The memory of man is as old as misfortune
• We should tackle reality in a slightly jokey way, otherwise we miss its point.
• 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.

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