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 DurrellI 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 DurrellAn idea is like a rare bird which cannot be seen. What one sees is the trembling of the branch it has just left.
Lawrence DurrellI 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 DurrellFor 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 DurrellTruth is a matter of direct apprehension-you can't climb a ladder of mental concepts to it.
Lawrence DurrellThe heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you.
Lawrence DurrellI 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 DurrellIt’s only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness.
Lawrence DurrellThe national characteristics... the restless metaphysical curiosity, the tenderness of good living and the passionate individualism. This is the invisible constant in a place with which the ordinary tourist can get in touch just by sitting quite quietly over a glass of wine in a Paris bistro.
Lawrence DurrellIt 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 DurrellYou see, nothing matters except pleasure - which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.
Lawrence DurrellBut I love to feel events overlapping each other, crawling over one another like wet crabs in a basket
Lawrence DurrellThere 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 DurrellLove 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…I once found a list of diseases as yet unclassified by medical science, and among these there occurred the word Islomania, which was described as a rare but by no means unknown affliction of spirit. There are people…who find islands somehow irresistible. The mere knowledge that they are on an island, a little world surrounded by the sea, fills them with an indescribable intoxication. These born “islomanes”…are direct descendents of the Atlanteans
Lawrence DurrellThe appalling thing is the degree of charity women are capable of. You see it all the time... love lavished on absolute fools. Love's a charity ward, you know.
Lawrence DurrellThe steward, according to custom, had stopped all the clocks. This, in the language of Narouz, said "Your stay with us is so brief, let us not be reminded of the flight of the hours."
Lawrence DurrellJourneys, 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 DurrellLife is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine
Lawrence DurrellOf women, the most we can say, not being Frenchmen, is that they are burrowing animals.
Lawrence Durrellafter all the work of the philosophers on his soul and the doctors on his body, what can we really say we know about a man? That he is, when all is said and done, just a passage for liquids and solids, a pipe of flesh.
Lawrence DurrellNow stiff on a pillar with a phallic air nelson stylites in Trafalgar square reminds the British what once they were.
Lawrence Durrell