Top 120 Lawrence Durrell Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “No history much? Perhaps. Only this ominous Dark beauty flowering under veils, Trapped in the spectrum of a dying style: A village like an instinct left to rust, Composed around the echo of a pistol-shot.”

— Lawrence Durrell

52. “All culture corrupts, but French culture corrupts absolutely.”

— Lawrence Durrell

53. “We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.”

— Lawrence Durrell

54. “Whatever the heart desires, it purchases at the cost of soul.”

— Lawrence Durrell

55. “God did not create us, nor did He wish us to be created. We are the work of a lesser deity, a demiurge, who wrongly believed himself to be God.”

— Lawrence Durrell

56. “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 in which one’s glances sink because they are nervous, curious, turned to sexual curiosity.”

— Lawrence Durrell

57. “I suppose the secret of his success is in his tremendous idleness which almost approaches the supernatural.”

— Lawrence Durrell

58. “But that is what islands are for; they are places where different destinies can meet and intersect in the full isolation of time.”

— Lawrence Durrell

59. “Slowly the bluish spring moon climbs the houses, sliding up the minarets into the clicking palm-trees, and with it the city seems to uncurl like some hibernating animal dug out of its winter earth, to stretch and begin to drink in the music of the three-day festival.”

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

61. “The cocktail party – as the name itself indicates – was originally invented by dogs. They are simply bottom-sniffings raised to the rank of formal ceremonies.”

— Lawrence Durrell

62. “Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.”

— Lawrence Durrell

63. “Youth is the age of despairs.”

— Lawrence Durrell

64. “Of women, the most we can say, not being Frenchmen, is that they are burrowing animals.”

— Lawrence Durrell

65. “He thought and suffered a good deal but he lacked the resolution to dare – the first requisite of a practitioner.”

— Lawrence Durrell

66. “The realisation of one’s own death is the point at which one becomes adult.”

— Lawrence Durrell

67. “I realized then the truth about all love: that it is an absolute which takes all or forfeits all. The other feelings, compassion, tenderness and so on, exist only on the periphery and belong on the constructions of society and habit. But she herself- austere and merciless Aphrodite-is a pagan. it is not our brains or instincts which she picks-but our very bones.”

— Lawrence Durrell

68. “Lovers can find nothing to say to each other that has not been said and unsaid a thousand times over. Kisses were invented to translate such nothings into wounds.”

— Lawrence Durrell

69. “What are stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?”

— Lawrence Durrell

70. “For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential – the imagination.”

— Lawrence Durrell

71. “The memory of man is as old as misfortune.”

— Lawrence Durrell

72. “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

73. “How grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work.”

— Lawrence Durrell

74. “Old age is an insult. It’s like being smacked.”

— Lawrence Durrell

75. “He hablado de la inutilidad del arte, pero no he dicho la verdad sobre el consuelo que procura.”

— Lawrence Durrell

76. “An idea is like a rare bird which cannot be seen. What one sees is the trembling of the branch it has just left.”

— Lawrence Durrell

77. “When one is fully extended by day and exhausted every evening one lives differently, without the weight of yesterday or tomorrow on one’s shoulders. I.”

— Lawrence Durrell

78. “Landscape-tones: brown to bronze, steep skyline, low cloud, pearl ground with shadowed oyster and violet reflections. The lion-dust of desert: prophets’ tombs turned to zinc and copper at sunset on the ancient lake.”

— Lawrence Durrell

79. “For years one has to put up with the feeling that people do not care, really care, about one; then one day with growing alarm, one realizes that it is God who does not care; and not merely that he does not care, he does not care one way or the other.”

— Lawrence Durrell

80. “We should tackle reality in a slightly jokey way, otherwise we miss its point.”

— Lawrence Durrell

81. “If she ever knew me at all she must later have discovered that for those of us who feel deeply and who are at all conscious of the inextricable tangle of human thought there is only one response to be made – ironic tenderness and silence.”

— Lawrence Durrell

82. “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!”

— Lawrence Durrell

83. “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. We shall all end like them – just a stain in the snow.”

— Lawrence Durrell

84. “People only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it.”

— Lawrence Durrell

85. “He loved the desert because there the wind blew out one’s footsteps like candle flames.”

— Lawrence Durrell

86. “A good doctor, and in a special sense the psychologist, makes it quite deliberately, slightly harder for the patient to recover too easily. You do this to see if his psyche has any real bounce in it, for the secret of healing is in the patient and not the doctor.”

— Lawrence Durrell

87. “No one thing can explain everything; though everything can illuminate something. God, I must be still drunk. If God were anything he would be an art. Sculpture or medicine. But the immense extension of knowledge in this our age, the growth of new sciences, makes it almost impossible for us to digest the available flavours and put them to use.”

— Lawrence Durrell

88. “It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you’d do something else.”

— Lawrence Durrell

89. “Truth is what most contradicts itself.”

— Lawrence Durrell

90. “None of the great religions have done more than exclude, throw out a long range of prohibitions. But prohibitions create the desire they are intended to cure. We of this Cabal say: indulge but refine. We are enlisting everything in order to make man’s wholeness match the wholeness of the universe – even pleasure, the destructive granulation of the mind in pleasure.”

— Lawrence Durrell

91. “Comedians are the nearest to suicide.”

— Lawrence Durrell

92. “There is nothing stranger than to love somebody who is mad, or who is intermittently so. The weight, the strain, the anxiety is a heavy load to bear – if only because among these confusional states and hysterias loom dreadful probabilities like suicide or murder. It shakes one’s hold also on one’s own grasp of reality; one realises how precariously we manage.”

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

94. “Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.”

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

96. “For all drama creates bondage, and the actor is only significant to the degree that he is bound.”

— Lawrence Durrell

97. “Truth is a matter of direct apprehension-you can’t climb a ladder of mental concepts to it.”

— Lawrence Durrell

98. “Some characters in the world are marked down for self-destruction, and to these no amount of rational argument can appeal.”

— Lawrence Durrell

99. “The sense of truth no matter how subjective is necessary for the experience of beauty.”

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell