Lawrence Durrell
» Age and Aging » “Old age is an insult. It’s like being smacked.”
» Arts and Artists » “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.”
» Charity » “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.”
» Death and Dying » “I’m trying to die correctly, but it’s very difficult, you know.”
» Heroes and Heroism » “Now stiff on a pillar with a phallic air nelson stylites in Trafalgar square reminds the British what once they were.”
» Letters » “A woman’s best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.”
» Love » “It’s unthinkable not to love –you’d have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you’d have to be Philip Larkin.”
» Love » “The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.”
» Music » “Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.”
» Music » “Music is only love looking for words.”
» Patriotism » “Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.”
» Rebellion » “No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.”
» Travel and Tourism » “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.”
» Truth » “Truth disappears with the telling of it.”
» Vulgarity » “It’s only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdy that you can get tenderness.”
» Women » “There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.”
