Prospero's Cell Quotes

“Grapes from this mountain region yield a wine that bubbles ever so slightly; an undertone of sulphur and rock. Ask for red wine at Lakones and they will bring you a glass of volcano's blood.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Prospero's Cell

“Never to imagine that any of these generalizations we make about gods or men is valid, but to cherish them because they carry in them the fallibility of our own minds.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Prospero's Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfu

“In every age, from every angle, we are facing the same set of natural phenomena, moonlight, death, religion, laughter, fear. We make idolatrous attempts to enclose them in a conceptual frame. And all the time they change under our very noses.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Prospero's Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfu

“Other countries may offer you discoveries in manners or lore or landscape; Greece offers you something harder—the discovery of yourself.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Prospero's Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfu

“If you had an opportunity to put a question to Socrates what would it be?” writes Zarian. “I would ask him if he was a happy man. I am sure that greater wisdom imposes a greater strain upon a man.” At the “Partridge” this view is contested bitterly by Peltours and N. Wisdom, they say, teaches the ratiocinative faculty how to rest, to attain a deeper surrender of the whole self to the flux of time and space. Theodore recalls Socrates’ epileptic fits while I find myself thinking of a line from Donne prefixed to “Coryat’s Crudities”: “When wilt thou be at full, Great Lunatique?”
― Lawrence Durrell, Prospero's Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfu