Top 120 Lawrence Durrell Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

55. “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

56. “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

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

— Lawrence Durrell

58. “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

59. “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

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

62. “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

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

— Lawrence Durrell

64. “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

65. “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

66. “Youth is the age of despairs.”

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— 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. “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

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

72. “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

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

75. “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

76. “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

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

— Lawrence Durrell

78. “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

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

91. “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

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

— Lawrence Durrell

93. “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

94. “Truth is what most contradicts itself.”

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

97. “Comedians are the nearest to suicide.”

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

99. “She gave me the impression of someone engaged in giving a series of savage caricatures of herself – but this is common to most lonely people who feel that their true self can find no correspondence in another.”

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell