Lawrence Durrell quotes

Lawrence Durrell was a British novelist, poet, and travel writer, widely celebrated for "The Alexandria Quartet." His richly textured works often explore complex human relationships and exotic settings. He is recognized as a leading figure of 20th-century English literature. Here are 66 of his quotes:

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

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

Lawrence Durrell

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.

Lawrence Durrell

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Lawrence Durrell

A city becomes a world when one loves one of it's inhabitants.

Lawrence Durrell

Music is only love looking for words.

Lawrence Durrell

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

Lawrence Durrell

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

Lawrence Durrell

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

Lawrence Durrell

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

Lawrence Durrell

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

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

Lawrence Durrell

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.

Lawrence Durrell

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

Lawrence Durrell

Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me and then show me the place where he was hanged.

Lawrence Durrell

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.

Lawrence Durrell

Science is the poetry of the intellect and poetry the science of the heart's affections.

Lawrence Durrell

Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?

Lawrence Durrell

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.

Lawrence Durrell

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.

Lawrence Durrell

History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living. (Lawrence Durrell)

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

Lawrence Durrell

Lovers can find nothing to say to each other that has not been said and unsaid a thousand times over. Kisses were invented to translate such nothings into wounds.

Lawrence Durrell

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

Lawrence Durrell

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

Lawrence Durrell

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Lawrence Durrell

Lawrence Durrell - Image

Photo: Wikimedia commons, CC BY 4.0

Occupation: British Novelist
Born: February 27, 1912
Died: November 7, 1990
Quotes count: 66
Wikipedia: Lawrence Durrell

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