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Lawrence Durrell Quotes (1912-1990)
Writer, Poet, Artist
About Lawrence Durrell
Lawrence George Durrell (27 February 1912 – 7 November 1990) was an expatriate British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer, though he resisted affiliation with Britain and preferred to be considered cosmopolitan. It has been posthumously suggested that Durrell never had British citizenship, though, more accurately, he became defined as a non-patrial in 1968, due to the amendment to the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962. His most famous work is the Alexandria Quartet. His brother was Gerald Durrell.
Best Lawrence Durrell Quotes
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Explore our curated collection of the most famous and impactful Lawrence Durrell quotes.
“Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.”
“I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.”
“No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.”
“A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.”
“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.”
“It's unthinkable not to love — you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin.”
“There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.”
“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.”
“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 (I)”
“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.”
“He had at last discovered that love had no pith in it, and that the projection of one own's feelings upon the images of a beloved was in the long run, an act of self-mutilation.”
“Then he saw that she was blind, her face slightly upcast to her companion's in the manner of those whose expressions never fully attain their target — the eyes of another. (II)”
“In French the truth of passion stood up coldly and cruelly to the scrutiny of human experience. In his own curious phrase he [Pursewarden] had always qualified it as 'an unsniggerable language'. (VIII)”
“The art of prose governed by syncopated thinking; for thoughts curdle in the heart if not expressed. An idea is like a rare bird which cannot be seen. What one sees is the trembling of the branch it has just left.”
“I return link by link along the iron chains of memory to the city which we inhabited so briefly together:the city which used us as its flora-precipitated in us conflicts which were hers and which we mistook for our own: beloved Alexandria!”
“I remember Nessim once saying [-] that Alexandria was the great winepress of love; those who emerged from it were the sick men, the solitaries, the prophets — I mean all who have been deeply wounded in their sex.”
Lawrence Durrell Quotes by Topic
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Lawrence Durrell on Places 4 quotes
View all 4 quotes on Places →Lawrence Durrell on History
“History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.”
Lawrence Durrell on Brazil
Lawrence Durrell on Introspection
“The best of [journeys] not only lead us outwards in space, but inwards as well. Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.”
Lawrence Durrell on Catholic Church
“Catholicism, for example, can be such a different religion in different places […] it is theologically the same, working on the same premises, but in each case it is subtly modified to suit the spirit of place. People have little to do with the matter except inasmuch as they themselves are reflections of their landscape.”
What Lawrence Durrell Said About Others
Discover personal opinions Lawrence Durrell shared regarding contemporaries.
Lawrence Durrell on Women
“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 on Roy Campbell (poet)
“He made enemies. He was held up as a Fascist by the poets of the Left but since they had already decreed that Plato was a Fascist, this too was something of a compliment. I once heard this wicked Fascist calmly recall that he had to leave South Africa because of the hostility he had aroused by seriously defending the cause of the Blacks in his writings...His reactions were those of a pastoral world in opposition to the industrial capital – the Tentacular City with its literary intrigues devised by the Intellect.”
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About Lawrence Durrell
Lawrence George Durrell (27 February 1912 – 7 November 1990) was an expatriate British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer, though he resisted affiliation with Britain and preferred to be considered cosmopolitan. It has been posthumously suggested that Durrell never had British citizenship, though, more accurately, he became defined as a non-patrial in 1968, due to the amendment to the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962. His most famous work is the Alexandria Quartet. His brother was Gerald Durrell.