Lawrence Durrell Quotes - Page 3

I have decided to leave Clea’s 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?

What are stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?

Gamblers and lovers really play to lose.

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

Shyness has laws you can only give yourself; tragically to those who least understand.

The memory of man is as old as misfortune

'We live' writes Pursewarden somewhere 'lives based upon selected fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time — not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation oа reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed.

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

The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you.

It's unthinkable not to love - you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin.

Truth is a matter of direct apprehension-you can't climb a ladder of mental concepts to it.

We should tackle reality in a slightly jokey way, otherwise we miss its point.

All culture corrupts, but French culture corrupts absolutely.

Life, the raw material, is only lived in potentia until the artist deploys it in his work.

I see artists as a great battalion moving through paint, words, music towards cosmological interpretation.

To be the equal of reality you must learn how to ignore it without danger.

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

The artist's work constitutes the only satisfactory relationship he can have with his fellow men since he seeks his real friends among the dead and the unborn.

To write a poem is like trying to catch a lizard without its tail falling off.

Frost in January minus 20 for a week. Dead birds frozen on the branch—they fall with the first thaw like ripe fruit—death-ripened. We shall all end like them—just a stain in the snow.

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.

Comedians are the nearest to suicide.

Art—the meaning of the pattern of our common actions in reality. The cloth-of-gold that hides behind the sackcloth of reality, forced out by the pain of human memory.

The realisation of one's own death is the point at which one becomes adult.

Sorrow is implicit in love as gravitation is implicit in mass.