Lawrence Durrell Quotes


"Our inventions mirror our secret wishes."
- Lawrence Durrell
(Related: Inventions, Wishes)

"We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it."
- Lawrence Durrell
(Related: Thought, Behavior, Children, Measure)

"Truth disappears with the telling of it."
- Lawrence Durrell
(Related: Truth)

"Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection."
- Lawrence Durrell
(Related: Travel)

"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
(Related: Love, Literature, Woman)

"The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time."
- Lawrence Durrell
(Related: Love, Time)

"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
(Related: Truth, Content, Desire, Rest, Sickness)

"Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked."
- Lawrence Durrell
(Related: Age, Being, Insult, Old)

"No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat."
- Lawrence Durrell
(Related: Being)

"Music was invented to confirm human loneliness."
- Lawrence Durrell
(Related: Music, Loneliness)

"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."
- Lawrence Durrell
(Related: Art, Imagination, People, Life, Artists, Compromise, Destiny, Potential)

"A city becomes a world when one loves one of it's inhabitants."
- Lawrence Durrell
(Related: World)

"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
(Related: Love, Women, Time, Charity, Fools)

"Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened."
- Lawrence Durrell
(Related: Men, Genius, Laughter)

"A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying."
- Lawrence Durrell
(Related: Love, Letters, Man, Woman)

"Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist."
- Lawrence Durrell
(Related: Artist, Country)

"Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment; only there does its satisfaction lie."
- Lawrence Durrell
(Related: Lie, Guilt, Punishment, Satisfaction)

"History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living."
- Lawrence Durrell
(Related: History, Living, Repetition, Wrong)

"It is not love that is blind, but jealousy."
- Lawrence Durrell
(Related: Love, Blind, Jealousy)

"I imagine, therefore I belong and am free."
- 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
(Related: Artists, Circumstances, May, Will)

"I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know."
- Lawrence Durrell
(Related: Trying)

"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
(Related: Time, Journey, Loneliness, Night, Yield)

"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
(Related: Energy, Neurosis)