The Alexandria Quartet Quotes

“Gamblers and lovers really play to lose.”
― 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

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

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

“You see, nothing matters except pleasure - which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“There are only three things to be done with a woman’ said Clea once. ‘You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“I realized then the truth about all love: that it is an absolute which takes all or forfeits all. The other feelings, compassion, tenderness and so on, exist only on the periphery and belong on the constructions of society and habit. But she herself- austere and merciless Aphrodite-is a pagan. it is not our brains or instincts which she picks-but our very bones.”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“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... For from here love degenerates into habit, possession, and back to loneliness.”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“In her, as an Alexandrian, licence was in a curious way a form of self-abnegation, a travesty of freedom; and if I saw her as an exemplar of the city it was not of Alexandria, or Plotinus that I was forced to think, but of the sad thirtieth child of Valentinus who fell, ‘not like Lucifer by rebelling against God, but by desiring too ardently to be united to him’.*”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“She gave me the impression of someone engaged in giving a series of savage caricatures of herself — but this is common to most lonely people who feel that their true self can find no correspondence in another.”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“Youth is the age of despairs.”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“My friends must all have known all along. Yet nobody breathed a word. But of course, the truth is that nobody ever does breathe a word, nobody interferes, nobody whispers while the acrobat is on the tight-rope; they just sit and watch the spectacle, waiting only to be wise after the event.”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“And I saw her as a sad thirtieth child of Valentine that fell, not as Lucifer rebelling against God, but because she too passionately wanted to be united with him! All things in excess become sin.”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“There is never enough light.” To which I responded without thought: “For women perhaps. We men are less exigent.”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“that only there, in the silences of the painter or the writer can reality be reordered, reworked and made to show its significant side. Our common actions in reality are simply the sackcloth covering which hides the cloth-of-gold — the meaning of the pattern. 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, The Alexandria Quartet

“But there are more than five sexes and only demotic Greek seems to distinguish among them.”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“If things were always what they seemed, how impoverished would be the imagination of man!”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“To these internal pressures we are gracefully adding by direct encouragement, the rigour of a nationalism based in a fanatical religion. I personally admire it, but never forget that it is a fighting religion with no metaphysics, only an ethic.”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“We have compromised so admirably with the question of their divinity that I should hate to see them replaced by a dictator or a Workers’ Council and a firing squad.” I had to protest at this preposterous view, but he was quite serious. “I assure you that this is the way the left-wing tends; its object is civil war, though it does not realize it — thanks to the cunning with which the sapless puritans like Shaw and company have presented their case.”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“When the British took control of Egypt the Copts occupied a number of the highest positions in the State. In less than a quarter of a century almost all the Coptic Heads of Departments had disappeared. They were at first fully represented in the bench of judges, but gradually the number was reduced to nil; the process of removing them and shutting the door against fresh appointments has gone on until they have been reduced to a state of discouragement bordering on despair!” These are the words of an Englishman.”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“First the young, like vines, climb up the dull supports of their elders who feel their fingers on them, soft and tender; then the old climb down the lovely supporting bodies of the young into their proper deaths.”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“A puritan culture’s conception of art is something which will endorse its morality and flatter its patriotism. Nothing else.”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“It was, if you like, the flirtation of minds prematurely exhausted by experience which seemed so much more dangerous than a love founded in sexual attraction.”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“Slowly the bluish spring moon climbs the houses, sliding up the minarets into the clicking palm-trees, and with it the city seems to uncurl like some hibernating animal dug out of its winter earth, to stretch and begin to drink in the music of the three-day festival.”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“The telephone is a modern symbol for communications which never take place”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“There are some characters in this world who are marked down for self-destruction, and to these no amount of rational argument can appeal. For my part Justine always reminded me of a somnambulist discovered treading the perilous leads of a high tower; any attempt to wake her with a shout might lead to disaster. One could only follow her silently in the hope of guiding her gradually away from the great shadowy drops which loomed up on every side. But by some curious paradox it was these”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“The slither of tyres across the waves of the desert under a sky blue and frost-bound in winter; or in summer a fearful lunar bombardment which turned the sea to phosphorus — bodies shining like tin, crushed in electric bubbles; or walking to the last spit of sand near Montaza, sneaking through the dense green darkness of the King’s gardens, past the drowsy sentry, to where the force of the sea was suddenly crippled and the waves hobbled over the sand-bar. Or”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“There was some unresolved inner knot which she wished to untie and which was quite beyond my skill as a lover or a friend. Of course. Of course. I knew as much as could be known of the psychopathology of hysteria at that time.”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“She looked like a statue of pride hanging its head.”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“It was cold in the street and I crossed to the lighted blaze of shops in Rue Fuad. In a grocer’s window I saw a small tin of olives with the name Orvieto on it, and overcome by a sudden longing to be on the right side of the Mediterranean, entered the shop: bought it: had it opened there and then: and sitting down at a marble table in that gruesome light I began to eat Italy, its dark scorched flesh, hand-modelled spring soil, dedicated vines. I felt that Melissa would never understand this. I should have to pretend I had lost the money. I did not see at first the great car which she had abandoned in the street with its engine running. She came into the shop with swift and resolute suddenness and said, with the air of authority that Lesbians, or women with money, assume with the obviously indigent: ‘What did you mean by your remark about the antinomian nature of irony?’ — or some such sally which I have forgotten.”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet