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
Topics: Travel, Tourism, Chance
Old age is an insult. It’s like being smacked.
—Lawrence Durrell
Topics: Age, Aging
Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.
—Lawrence Durrell
Topics: Travel
Truth disappears with the telling of it.
—Lawrence Durrell
Topics: Truth
Music is only love looking for words.
—Lawrence Durrell
Topics: Music, Words
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
Topics: Women
A woman’s best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.
—Lawrence Durrell
Topics: Letters
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
Topics: Artists, Art, Arts
No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.
—Lawrence Durrell
Topics: Revolution
It’s only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdy that you can get tenderness.
—Lawrence Durrell
Topics: Swearing, Profanity, Vulgarity
Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.
—Lawrence Durrell
Topics: Patriotism
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
Topics: Charity
It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.
—Lawrence Durrell
Topics: Jealousy
It’s unthinkable not to love—you’d have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you’d have to be Philip Larkin.
—Lawrence Durrell
Topics: Love
Now stiff on a pillar with a phallic air nelson stylites in Trafalgar square reminds the British what once they were.
—Lawrence Durrell
Topics: Heroism, Heroes/Heroism, Heroes
Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.
—Lawrence Durrell
Topics: One liners, Wishes
Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.
—Lawrence Durrell
Topics: Music
I’m trying to die correctly, but it’s very difficult, you know.
—Lawrence Durrell
Topics: Death, Dying
The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.
—Lawrence Durrell
Topics: Love
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Lytton Strachey British Biographer
- Margaret Drabble English Novelist
- Graham Greene British Novelist
- Doris Lessing British Novelist, Poet
- Rudyard Kipling British Children’s Books Writer
- Samuel Johnson British Essayist
- Edgar Lee Masters American Poet, Novelist
- John Jay Chapman American Writer
- Gladys Bronwyn Stern British Novelist
- Dodie Smith British Novelist
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