Lawrence Durrell
Very few people realise that sex is a psychic and not a physical act. The clumsy coupling of human beings is simply a biological paraphrase of this truth - a primitive method of introducing minds to each other, engaging them. But most people are stuck in the physical aspect, unaware of the poetic rapport which it so clumsily tries to teach.Collection: Sex
The national characteristics... the restless metaphysical curiosity, the tenderness of good living and the passionate individualism. This is the invisible constant in a place with which the ordinary tourist can get in touch just by sitting quite quietly over a glass of wine in a Paris bistro.Collection: Wine
A taste older than meat, older than wine. A taste as old as cold water.Collection: Food
These are the moments which are not calculable, and cannot be assessed in words; they live on in the solution of memory, like wonderful creatures, unique of their own kind, dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean.Collection: Memories
Everything really desirable has come about because of, or in spite of, wine!Collection: Wine
The loved object is simply one that has shared an experience at the same moment of time, narcissistically; and 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. All this may precede the first look, kiss, or touch; precede ambition, pride, or envy; precede the first declarations which mark the turning point—for from here love degenerates into habit, possession, and back to loneliness.Collection: Loneliness
A diary is the last place to go if you wish to seek the truth about a person. Nobody dares to make the final confession to themselves on paper: or at least, not about love.Collection: Wish
What are stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?Collection: Stars
I have decided to leave Clea’s last letter un-answered. I no longer wish to coerce anyone, to make promises, to think of life in terms of compacts, resolutions, covenants. It will be up to Clea to interpret my silence according to her own needs and desires, to come to me if she has need or not, as the case may be. Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?Collection: Thinking
Gamblers and lovers really play to lose.Collection: Play
The memory of man is as old as misfortuneCollection: Memories
Shyness has laws you can only give yourself; tragically to those who least understand.Collection: Law
'We live' writes Pursewarden somewhere 'lives based upon selected fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time — not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation oа reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed.Collection: Writing
Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment: only there does its satisfaction lie.Collection: Lying
The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you.Collection: Art
It's unthinkable not to love - you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin.Collection: Love
Truth is a matter of direct apprehension-you can't climb a ladder of mental concepts to it.Collection: Truth
All culture corrupts, but French culture corrupts absolutely.Collection: French Culture
Life, the raw material, is only lived in potentia until the artist deploys it in his work.Collection: Artist
To be the equal of reality you must learn how to ignore it without danger.Collection: Reality
The artist's work constitutes the only satisfactory relationship he can have with his fellow men since he seeks his real friends among the dead and the unborn.Collection: Real
To write a poem is like trying to catch a lizard without its tail falling off.Collection: Fall
We should tackle reality in a slightly jokey way, otherwise we miss its point.Collection: Reality
Comedians are the nearest to suicide.Collection: Suicide
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.Collection: Art
People only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it.Collection: People
There is no pain compared to that of loving a woman who makes her body accessible to one and yet who is incapable of delivering her true self -- because she does not know where to find it.Collection: Pain
She took kisses like so many coats of paint […] how long and how vainly I searched for excuses which might make her amorality if not palatable at lest understandable. I realize now the time I wasted in this way; instead of enjoying her and turning aside from these preoccupations with the thought, ‘She is untrustworthy as she is beautiful. She takes love as plants do water, lightly, thoughtlessly.Collection: Beautiful
Frost in January minus 20 for a week. Dead birds frozen on the branch—they fall with the first thaw like ripe fruit—death-ripened. We shall all end like them—just a stain in the snow.Collection: Fall
Odd, isn't it? He really was the right man for her in a sort of way; but then as you know, it is a law of love that the so-called 'right' person always comes to soon or too late.Collection: Men
It’s only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness.Collection: Real
I see artists as a great battalion moving through paint, words, music towards cosmological interpretation.Collection: Moving
The sense of truth no matter how subjective is necessary for the experience of beauty.Collection: Beauty
The cocktail party - as the name itself indicates - was originally invented by dogs. They are simply bottom-sniffings raised to the rank of formal ceremonies.Collection: Dog
Of women, the most we can say, not being Frenchmen, is that they are burrowing animals.Collection: Women
A critic is a lug-worm in the liver of literature.Collection: Criticism
Brazil is bigger than Europe, wilder than Africa, and weirder than Baffin Land.Collection: Europe
The effective in art is what rapes the emotions of your audience without nourishing its values.Collection: Art
No history much? Perhaps. Only this ominous Dark beauty flowering under veils, Trapped in the spectrum of a dying style: A village like an instinct left to rust, Composed around the echo of a pistol-shot.Collection: Dark
You see, nothing matters except pleasure - which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.Collection: Opposites
He thought and suffered a good deal but he lacked the resolution to dare--the first requisite of a practitioner.Collection: Firsts
All artists today are expected to cultivate a little fashionable unhappiness.Collection: Artist
Truth is what most contradicts itself.Collection: Truth
I am just a refugee from the long slow toothache of English life. It is terrible to love life so much you can hardly breathe!Collection: Love Life
They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures - and the best of them lead us not only outward in space, but inward as well.Collection: Flower
Let us define 'man' as a poet perpetually conspiring against himself.Collection: Men
I suppose the secret of his success is in his tremendous idleness which almost approaches the supernatural.Collection: Secret
Now stiff on a pillar with a phallic air nelson stylites in Trafalgar square reminds the British what once they were.Collection: Squares
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."Collection: Emotion