Clea Quotes

“Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Clea

“Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine”
― Lawrence Durrell, Clea

“One word ‘love’ has to do service for so many different kinds of the same animal.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Clea

“The most tender, the most tragic of illusions is perhaps to believe that our actions can add or subtract from the total quantity of good and evil in the world.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Clea

“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.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Clea

“First you have to know and understand intellectually what you want to do - then you have to sleepwalk a little to reach it.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Clea

“A good doctor, and in a special sense the psychologist, makes it quite deliberately, slightly harder for the patient to recover too easily. You do this to see if his psyche has any real bounce in it, for the secret of healing is in the patient and not the doctor.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Clea

“The seeds of future events are carried within ourselves. They are implicit in us and unfold according to the laws of their own nature”
― Lawrence Durrell, Clea

“Let us go to bed together and ignore the loutish reality of the world.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Clea

“and all at once it seemed that past and present had joined again without any divisions in it, and that all my memories and impressions had ordered themselves into one complete pattern whose metaphor was always the shining city of the disinherited — a city now trying softly to spread the sticky prismatic wings of a new-born dragonfly on the night.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Clea

“Ancient lands, in all their prehistoric intactness: lake-solitudes hardly brushed by the hurrying feet of the centuries where the uninterrupted pedigrees of pelican and ibis and heron evolve their slow destinies in complete seclusion.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Clea

“Words are the mirrors of our discontents merely; they contain all the huge unhatched eggs of the world's sorrows.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Clea

“If you are born of the artist tribe it is a waste of time to try and function as a priest. You have to be faithful to your angle of vision, and at the same time recognise its partiality. There is a kind of perfection to be achieved in matching oneself to one's capacities at every level. This must, I imagine, do away with strivings, and with illusions too.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Clea

“He always puzzled me —except when I had him in my arms.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Clea

“A puritan culture’s conception of art is something which will endorse its morality and flatter its patriotism.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Clea

“A million muffin-eating moralists were waiting, not for us, Brother Ass, but for the plucky and tedious Trollope!”
― Lawrence Durrell, Clea

“The real teacher is endurance.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Clea

“(‘Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine’.)”
― Lawrence Durrell, Clea

“We were like mourners at an invisible cenotaph during the two minutes’ silence which commemorates an irremediable failure of the human will.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Clea

“One learns nothing from those who return our love.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Clea

“This world represents the promise of a unique happiness which we are not well-enough equipped to grasp.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Clea

“But then is not life itself a fairy-tale which we lose the power of apprehending as we grow? No matter.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Clea

“The oranges were more plentiful than usual that year. They glowed in their arbours of burnished green leaf like lanterns, flickering up there among the sunny woods. It was as if they were eager to celebrate our departure from the little island -- for at last the long-awaited message from Nessim had come, like a summons back to the Underworld. A message which was to draw me back inexorably to the one city which for me always hovered between illusion and reality, between the substance and the poetic images which its very name aroused in me.... Alexandria, the capital of memory!”
― Lawrence Durrell, Clea