Lawrence Durrell's Quotes

It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.

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.

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

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

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

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

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

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

I imagine, therefore I belong and am free.

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

Truth disappears with the telling of it.

Music is only love looking for words.

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

Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.