Daria > Daria's Quotes

“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.”
― Lawrence Durrell

“Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“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.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“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.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Bitter Lemons of Cyprus

“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.”
― Lawrence Durrell

“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, Justine

“Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me, and then show me the place where he was hanged.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“It is a pity indeed to travel and not get this essential sense of landscape values. You do not need a sixth sense for it. It is there if you just close your eyes and breathe softly through your nose; you will hear the whispered message, for all landscapes ask the same question in the same whisper. 'I am watching you -- are you watching yourself in me?' Most travelers hurry too much...the great thing is to try and travel with the eyes of the spirit wide open, and not to much factual information. To tune in, without reverence, idly -- but with real inward attention. It is to be had for the feeling...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.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Spirit of Place : Letters and Essays on Travel

“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.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you...”
― Lawrence Durrell

“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.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar

“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.”
― Lawrence Durrell

“What are stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?”
― Lawrence Durrell

“History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living”
― Lawrence Durrell

“اننا عادة ما نولد لكي نحب هؤلاء الذين يصيبوننا بالجراح اكثر من غيرهم
رباعية الإسكندرية - بلتازار”
― Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar

“Art like life is an open secret.”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“Science is the poetry of the intellect and poetry the science of the heart's affections.”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“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.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar

“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.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“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.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar

“The effective in art is what rapes the emotions of your audience without nourishing its values. ”
― Lawrence Durrell

“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.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar

“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.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“In these days Melissa's absorbed and provoking gentleness had all the qualities of a rediscovered youth. Her long uncertain fingers - I used to feel them moving over my face when she thought I slept, as if to memorize the happiness we had shared. In her there was a pliancy, a resilience which was Oriental - a passion to serve. My shabby clothes - the way she picked up a dirty shirt seemed to engulf it with an overflowing solicitude; in the morning I found my razor beautifully cleaned and even the toothpaste laid upon the brush in readiness. Her care for me was a goad, provoking me to give my life some sort of shape and style that might match the simplicity of hers. Of her experiences in love she would never speak, turning from them with a weariness and distaste which suggested that they had been born of necessity rather than desire. She paid me the comlpiment of saying: "For the first time I am not afraid to be light-headed or foolish with a man".”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“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.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“I have done so many things in my life," she said to the mirror. "Evil things, perhaps. But never unattentively, never wastefully...was I wrong?”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“The world is like a cucumber—today it's in your hand, tomorrow up your arse.”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“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!”
― Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar