Lawrence Durrell
It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.Collection: Jealousy
There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.Collection: Love
Truth disappears with the telling of it.Collection: Truth
Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.Collection: Age
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.Collection: Women
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.Collection: Imagination
Music is only love looking for words.Collection: Love
History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.Collection: History
Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.Collection: Music
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.Collection: Truth
The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.Collection: Love
Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.Collection: Men
Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.Collection: Travel
I imagine, therefore I belong and am free.Collection: Imagination
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.
We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it.
Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.
A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.
A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.
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.
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.
Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.
I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.
Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment; only there does its satisfaction lie.
No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.
Whatever the heart desires, it purchases at the cost of soulCollection: Heart
The whole Mediterranean, the sculpture, the palm, the gold beads, the bearded heroes, the wine, the ideas, the ships, the moonlight, the winged gorgons, the bronze men, the philosophers - all of it seems to rise in the sour, pungent taste of these black olives between the teeth. A taste older than meat, older than wine. A taste as old as cold water.Collection: Hero
We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.Collection: Believe
I don’t believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he has not experienced.Collection: Believe
Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagineCollection: Thinking
Truth is a woman. That is why it is enigmatic.Collection: Truth
They say that if you get bored enough with calamity you can learn to laugh.Collection: Adversity
Science is the poetry of the intellect and poetry the science of the heart's affections.Collection: Heart
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 woundsCollection: Kissing
Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?Collection: Silence
Try and travel with the eyes of the spirit wide open, and not too much factual information. To tune in, without reverence, idly -- but with real inward attention. It is to be had for the feeling, that mysterious sense of rapport, of identity with the ground. You can extract the essence of a place once you know how. If you just get as still as a needle you'll be there.Collection: Travel
An idea is like a rare bird which cannot be seen. What one sees is the trembling of the branch it has just left.Collection: Ideas
Every man is made of clay and diamond, and no woman can nourish both.Collection: Men
It is not peace we seek but meaning.Collection: Peace
Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me, and then show me the place where he was hanged.Collection: Heart
It is the duty of every patriot to hate his country creatively.Collection: Country
Love is like trench warfare - you cannot see the enemy, but you know he is there and that it is wiser to keep your head down.Collection: Love Is
I have been thinking about the girl I met last night in the mirror: dark on the marble-ivory white: glossy black hair: deep suspiring eyes in which one's glances sink because they are nervous, curious, turned to sexual curiosity.Collection: Girl
Life is like a cucumber. One minute it's in your hand, the next it's up you ass.Collection: Hands
…I once found a list of diseases as yet unclassified by medical science, and among these there occurred the word Islomania, which was described as a rare but by no means unknown affliction of spirit. There are people…who find islands somehow irresistible. The mere knowledge that they are on an island, a little world surrounded by the sea, fills them with an indescribable intoxication. These born “islomanes”…are direct descendents of the AtlanteansCollection: Mean
Prohibitions create the desire they were intended to cure.Collection: Desire
Religion is simply art bastardized out of all recognition.Collection: Art
I am quite alone. I am neither happy nor unhappy; I lie suspended like a hair or a feather in the cloudy mixtures of memory.Collection: Memories
Somewhere in the heart of experience there is an order and a coherence which we might purprise if we were attentive enough, loving enough, or patient enough.Collection: Heart
It only takes one match to ignite a haystack, or one remark to fire a mind.Collection: Fire