Lawrence Durrell Quotes

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

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

Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment; only there does its satisfaction lie.

- Lawrence Durrell

The 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 Durrell

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

Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.

- Lawrence Durrell

A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.

- Lawrence Durrell

The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.

- Lawrence Durrell

Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.

- Lawrence Durrell

Truth disappears with the telling of it.

- Lawrence Durrell

I had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time - those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything.

- Lawrence Durrell

We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it.

- Lawrence Durrell

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

- Lawrence Durrell

Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.

- Lawrence Durrell

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.

- Lawrence Durrell

Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.

- Lawrence Durrell

I imagine, therefore I belong and am free.

- Lawrence Durrell

History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.

- Lawrence Durrell

No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.

- Lawrence Durrell

I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.

- Lawrence Durrell

Music is only love looking for words.

- Lawrence Durrell

There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.

- Lawrence Durrell

It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.

- Lawrence Durrell

A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.

- Lawrence Durrell

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

- Lawrence Durrell