Top 15 Lawrence Durrell Quotes

The art of prose governed by syncopated thinking; for thoughts curdle in the heart if not expressed. An idea is like a rare bird which cannot be seen. What one sees is the trembling of the branch it has just left.

He had at last discovered that love had no pith in it, and that the projection of one own's feelings upon the images of a beloved was in the long run, an act of self-mutilation.

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

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.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Subconsciously he knew too, that the oriental woman is not a sensualist in the European sense; there is nothing mawkish in her constitution. Her true obsessions are power, politics and possessions - however much she might deny it. The sex ticks on in the mind, but its motions are warmed by the kinetic brutalities of money. (X)

The Copts — the only branch of the Christian Church which was thoroughly integrated into the Orient! But then your good Bishop of Salisbury openly said he considered these oriental Christians as worse than infidels, and your Crusaders massacred them joyfully.

In French the truth of passion stood up coldly and cruelly to the scrutiny of human experience. In his own curious phrase he [Pursewarden] had always qualified it as 'an unsniggerable language'. (VIII)

here was Kenilworth now heading the new department concerned with Personnel [-] one of those blank administrative constructs which offered no openings into the world of policy. A dead end. [-] he would soon develop the negative powers of obstruction which always derive from a sense of failure. (IV)

Then he saw that she was blind, her face slightly upcast to her companion's in the manner of those whose expressions never fully attain their target — the eyes of another. (II)

His profession [ diplomacy ] — offered him something like a long Jesuitical training in self-deception which enabled him to present an ever more highly polished surface to the world without deepening his human experience [-] for he lived surrounded by his ambitious and sycophantic fellows who taught him only how to excel in forms of address, and the elaborate kindnesses which, in pleasing, pave the way to advancement. (II)

the confluent smallpox – invented perhaps as the cruellest remedy for human vanity (II)

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 (I)

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

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