Lawrence Durrell Quotes

99 quotes in 1243 categories

• The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you...
• 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…
• 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…
• Somewhere in the heart of experience there is an order and a coherence which we might purprise if we were attentive enough, loving enough, or…
• We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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.
• He thought and suffered a good deal but he lacked the resolution to dare--the first requisite of a practitioner.
• Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me, and then show me the place where he was hanged.
• Art—the 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…
• 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…
• She took kisses like so many coats of paint […] how long and how vainly I searched for excuses which might make her amorality if…
• I suppose the secret of his success is in his tremendous idleness which almost approaches the supernatural.
• 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?
• People only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it.
• How grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work.
• 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…
• 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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