Quotes by Lawrence Durrell

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

“Music was invented to confirm human loneliness”

“It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.”

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

“A womans best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.”

“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.”

“Truth disappears with the telling of it”

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

“Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.”

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

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

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. God made eternity. Let us escape from the despotism of time altogether. These ancient and hereditary politenesses filled Nessim with emotion.

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

Underneath an artists preoccupations with sex, society, religion, etc. (all the staple abstractions that allow the forebrain to chatter) there is a soul tortured beyond endurance by the lack of tenderness in the world.

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.

Art like life is an open secret.

Each of our five senses contains an art.

I don’t believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he has not experienced.

... history - the lamp which illumines national character...

Music is only love looking for words.