Top 120 Lawrence Durrell Quotes (2024 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. “Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.”

— Lawrence Durrell

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

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

12. “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

13. “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

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

— Lawrence Durrell

15. “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

16. “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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17. “Truth disappears with the telling of it.”

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

21. “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

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

24. “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

25. “Love is poetry plus biology.”

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

30. “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

31. “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

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

— Lawrence Durrell

33. “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

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

37. “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

38. “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

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

42. “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

43. “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

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

— Lawrence Durrell

45. “There is no pain compared to that of loving a woman who makes her body accessible to one and yet who is incapable of delivering her true self – because she does not know where to find it.”

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

48. “But I love to feel events overlapping each other, crawling over one another like wet crabs in a basket.”

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

50. “Sorrow is implicit in love as gravitation is implicit in mass.”

— Lawrence Durrell