Top 120 Lawrence Durrell Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Shyness has laws you can only give yourself; tragically to those who least understand.”

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

103. “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. They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures – and the best of them lead us not only outwards in space, but inwards as well. Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection...”

— Lawrence Durrell

104. “Life, the raw material, is only lived in potentia until the artist deploys it in his work.”

— Lawrence Durrell

105. “I see artists as a great battalion moving through paint, words, music towards cosmological interpretation.”

— Lawrence Durrell

106. “Words, the acid-bath of words.”

— Lawrence Durrell

107. “Love joins and then divides. How else would we be growing?”

— Lawrence Durrell

108. “There are some characters in this world who are marked down for self-destruction, and to these no amount of rational argument can appeal. For my part Justine always reminded me of a somnambulist discovered treading the perilous leads of a high tower; any attempt to wake her with a shout might lead to disaster. One could only follow her silently in the hope of guiding her gradually away from the great shadowy drops which loomed up on every side. But by some curious paradox it was these.”

— Lawrence Durrell

109. “The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you...”

— Lawrence Durrell

110. “They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures – and the best of them lead us not only outward in space, but inward as well.”

— Lawrence Durrell

111. “There was some unresolved inner knot which she wished to untie and which was quite beyond my skill as a lover or a friend. Of course. Of course. I knew as much as could be known of the psychopathology of hysteria at that time.”

— Lawrence Durrell

112. “Let us go to bed together and ignore the loutish reality of the world.”

— Lawrence Durrell

113. “Africa, which they had somehow visualized as an extension of Europe – an extension of terms, of references to a definitive past – had already asserted itself as something different: a forbidding darkness where the croaking ravens matched the dry exclamations of spiritless men, and rationed laughter fashioned from breath simply the chattering of baboons. Sometimes they captured someone – a solitary frightened man out hunting hares – and were amazed to see that he was human like themselves.”

— Lawrence Durrell

114. “The artist’s work constitutes the only satisfactory relationship he can have with his fellow men since he seeks his real friends among the dead and the unborn.”

— Lawrence Durrell

115. “Any concentration of the will displaces life and gives it bias in motion. Reality, he believed, was always trying to copy the imagination of man, from which it derived.”

— Lawrence Durrell

116. “To be the equal of reality you must learn how to ignore it without danger.”

— Lawrence Durrell

117. “Everything really desirable has come about because of, or in spite of, wine!”

— Lawrence Durrell

118. “A critic is a lug-worm in the liver of literature.”

— Lawrence Durrell

119. “Grapes from this mountain region yield a wine that bubbles ever so slightly; an undertone of sulphur and rock. Ask for red wine at Lakones and they will bring you a glass of volcano’s blood.”

— Lawrence Durrell

120. “It was, if you like, the flirtation of minds prematurely exhausted by experience which seemed so much more dangerous than a love founded in sexual attraction.”

— Lawrence Durrell

121. “With all its imperfections lying heavy on its head, I can’t help being attached to it because in the writing of it I first heard the sound of my own voice, lame and halting perhaps, but nevertheless my very own. This is an experience no artist ever forgets – the birth cry of a newly born baby of letters, the genuine article.”

— Lawrence Durrell

122. “This weird translation of feelings into gestures which belied words and words which belied gestures, confused and disoriented her. She needed someone to tell her whether to laugh or to cry.”

— Lawrence Durrell

123. “Is it any wonder that I absent-mindedly take the entrance marked Aliens Only whenever I enter?”

— Lawrence Durrell

124. “The seeds of future events are carried within ourselves. They are implicit in us and unfold according to the laws of their own nature.”

— Lawrence Durrell

125. “Poverty is a great cutter-off and riches a great shutter-off.”

— Lawrence Durrell

126. “It’s unthinkable not to love -you’d have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you’d have to be Philip Larkin.”

— Lawrence Durrell

127. “All artists today are expected to cultivate a little fashionable unhappiness.”

— Lawrence Durrell

128. “They say that if you get bored enough with calamity you can learn to laugh.”

— Lawrence Durrell

129. “First you have to know and understand intellectually what you want to do – then you have to sleepwalk a little to reach it.”

— Lawrence Durrell

130. “There is never enough light.” To which I responded without thought: “For women perhaps. We men are less exigent.”

— Lawrence Durrell

131. “One always falls in love with the love-choice of the person one loves.”

— Lawrence Durrell

132. “My friends must all have known all along. Yet nobody breathed a word. But of course, the truth is that nobody ever does breathe a word, nobody interferes, nobody whispers while the acrobat is on the tight-rope; they just sit and watch the spectacle, waiting only to be wise after the event.”

— Lawrence Durrell