Lawrence Durrell Quotes - Page 4

No history much? Perhaps. Only this ominous Dark beauty flowering under veils, Trapped in the spectrum of a dying style: A village like an instinct left to rust, Composed around the echo of a pistol-shot.

But I love to feel events overlapping each other, crawling over one another like wet crabs in a basket

I have done so many things in my life," she said to the mirror. "Evil things, perhaps. But never unattentively, never wastefully...was I wrong?

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.

There is no pain compared to that of loving a woman who makes her body accessible to one and yet who is incapable of delivering her true self -- because she does not know where to find it.

People only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it.

She took kisses like so many coats of paint […] how long and how vainly I searched for excuses which might make her amorality if not palatable at lest understandable. I realize now the time I wasted in this way; instead of enjoying her and turning aside from these preoccupations with the thought, ‘She is untrustworthy as she is beautiful. She takes love as plants do water, lightly, thoughtlessly.

Odd, isn't it? He really was the right man for her in a sort of way; but then as you know, it is a law of love that the so-called 'right' person always comes to soon or too late.

It’s only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness.

The sense of truth no matter how subjective is necessary for the experience of beauty.

The cocktail party - as the name itself indicates - was originally invented by dogs. They are simply bottom-sniffings raised to the rank of formal ceremonies.

Of women, the most we can say, not being Frenchmen, is that they are burrowing animals.

I suppose the secret of his success is in his tremendous idleness which almost approaches the supernatural.

after all the work of the philosophers on his soul and the doctors on his body, what can we really say we know about a man? That he is, when all is said and done, just a passage for liquids and solids, a pipe of flesh.

Brazil is bigger than Europe, wilder than Africa, and weirder than Baffin Land.

All artists today are expected to cultivate a little fashionable unhappiness.

The effective in art is what rapes the emotions of your audience without nourishing its values.

The steward, according to custom, had stopped all the clocks. This, in the language of Narouz, said "Your stay with us is so brief, let us not be reminded of the flight of the hours."

Truth is what most contradicts itself.

Poverty is a great cutter-off and riches a great shutter-off.

A critic is a lug-worm in the liver of literature.

Let us define 'man' as a poet perpetually conspiring against himself.

They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures - and the best of them lead us not only outward in space, but inward as well.

You see, nothing matters except pleasure - which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.

How grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work.