Lawrence Durrell Quotes - Page 2

It only takes one match to ignite a haystack, or one remark to fire a mind.

A diary is the last place to go if you wish to seek the truth about a person. Nobody dares to make the final confession to themselves on paper: or at least, not about love.

Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.

Every man is made of clay and diamond, and no woman can nourish both.

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

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

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.

Prohibitions create the desire they were intended to cure.

Music is only love looking for words.

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.

It is the duty of every patriot to hate his country creatively.

Art like life is an open secret.

Life is like a cucumber. One minute it's in your hand, the next it's up you ass.

I am quite alone. I am neither happy nor unhappy; I lie suspended like a hair or a feather in the cloudy mixtures of memory.

Love 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.

I 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.

…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

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

Very few people realise that sex is a psychic and not a physical act. The clumsy coupling of human beings is simply a biological paraphrase of this truth - a primitive method of introducing minds to each other, engaging them. But most people are stuck in the physical aspect, unaware of the poetic rapport which it so clumsily tries to teach.

Religion is simply art bastardized out of all recognition.

These are the moments which are not calculable, and cannot be assessed in words; they live on in the solution of memory, like wonderful creatures, unique of their own kind, dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean.

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.

The 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.

Everything really desirable has come about because of, or in spite of, wine!

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