Itโs only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness.
Lawrence DurrellFrost in January minus 20 for a week. Dead birds frozen on the branchโthey fall with the first thaw like ripe fruitโdeath-ripened. We shall all end like themโjust a stain in the snow.
Lawrence DurrellI have decided to leave Cleaโs last letter un-answered. I no longer wish to coerce anyone, to make promises, to think of life in terms of compacts, resolutions, covenants. It will be up to Clea to interpret my silence according to her own needs and desires, to come to me if she has need or not, as the case may be. Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?
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 DurrellโฆI 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 peopleโฆwho 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 โislomanesโโฆare direct descendents of the Atlanteans
Lawrence Durrell