Top 120 Lawrence Durrell Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Lawrence Durrell

2. “Music is only love looking for words.”

— Lawrence Durrell

3. “Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine.”

— Lawrence Durrell

4. “Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.”

— Lawrence Durrell

5. “Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.”

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

8. “Science is the poetry of the intellect and poetry the science of the heart’s affections.”

— Lawrence Durrell

9. “To write a poem is like trying to catch a lizard without its tail falling off.”

— Lawrence Durrell

10. “I’m trying to die correctly, but it’s very difficult, you know.”

— Lawrence Durrell

11. “Art like life is an open secret.”

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

13. “Truth is a woman. That is why it is enigmatic.”

— Lawrence Durrell

14. “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 of human memory.”

— Lawrence Durrell

15. “Life is like a cucumber. One minute it’s in your hand, the next it’s up you ass.”

— Lawrence Durrell

16. “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.”

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

18. “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.”

— Lawrence Durrell

19. “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.”

— Lawrence Durrell

20. “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.”

— Lawrence Durrell

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21. “History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.”

— Lawrence Durrell

22. “Truth disappears with the telling of it.”

— Lawrence Durrell

23. “Gamblers and lovers really play to lose.”

— Lawrence Durrell

24. “Each of our five senses contains an art.”

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

26. “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.”

— Lawrence Durrell

27. “It is not peace we seek but meaning.”

— Lawrence Durrell

28. “There are only three things to be done with a woman’ said Clea once. ‘You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.”

— Lawrence Durrell

29. “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.”

— Lawrence Durrell

30. “And morality is nothing if it is merely a form of good behavior.”

— Lawrence Durrell

31. “The most tender, the most tragic of illusions is perhaps to believe that our actions can add or subtract from the total quantity of good and evil in the world.”

— Lawrence Durrell

32. “Love is poetry plus biology.”

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

34. “Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.”

— Lawrence Durrell

35. “Prohibitions create the desire they were intended to cure.”

— Lawrence Durrell

36. “We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it.”

— Lawrence Durrell

37. “Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me, and then show me the place where he was hanged.”

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

39. “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 patient enough.”

— Lawrence Durrell

40. “The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.” Lawrence Durrell in “Clea,” book three of the epic Alexandria Quartet – which I am reading for the third time since my early 20s... relishing its superb prose and enigmatic insights into the nature of love.”

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

43. “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.”

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

46. “These are the moments which are not calculable, and cannot be assessed in words; they live on in the solution of memory, like wonderful creatures, unique of their own kind, dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean.”

— Lawrence Durrell

47. “Poetry is what happens when an anxiety meets a technique.”

— Lawrence Durrell

48. “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.”

— Lawrence Durrell

49. “A woman’s best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.”

— Lawrence Durrell

50. “But there are more than five sexes and only demotic Greek seems to distinguish among them.”

— Lawrence Durrell