Lawrence Durrell

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

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

“Art like life is an open secret.”

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

“Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.”

“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.”

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

“Music is only love looking for words.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“the desire to be near the beloved object is at first not due to the idea of possessing it, but simply to let the two experiences compare themselves, like reflections in different mirrors... For from here love degenerates into habit, possession, and back to loneliness.”

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

“How grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Poverty is a great cutter-off and riches a great shutter-off.”

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

“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.”