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Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.

Lawrence Durrell

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Lawrence Durrell
Age: 78 †
Born: 1912
Born: January 1
Died: 1990
Died: November 8
Autobiographer
Biographer
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Visual Artist
Writer
Jullundur
Genius
Joy
Happiness
Young
Men
Like
Mercifully
Intervened
Laughter

More quotes by Lawrence Durrell

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Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.
Lawrence Durrell
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To write a poem is like trying to catch a lizard without its tail falling off.
Lawrence Durrell
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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
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He thought and suffered a good deal but he lacked the resolution to dare--the first requisite of a practitioner.
Lawrence Durrell
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Let us define 'man' as a poet perpetually conspiring against himself.
Lawrence Durrell
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You see, nothing matters except pleasure - which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.
Lawrence Durrell
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Life, the raw material, is only lived in potentia until the artist deploys it in his work.
Lawrence Durrell
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I see artists as a great battalion moving through paint, words, music towards cosmological interpretation.
Lawrence Durrell
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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
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To be the equal of reality you must learn how to ignore it without danger.
Lawrence Durrell
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How grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work.
Lawrence Durrell
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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
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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
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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
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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.
Lawrence Durrell
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Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.
Lawrence Durrell
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It only takes one match to ignite a haystack, or one remark to fire a mind.
Lawrence Durrell
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Lovers can find nothing to say to each other that has not been said and unsaid a thousand times over. Kisses were invented to translate such nothings into wounds
Lawrence Durrell
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'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.
Lawrence Durrell
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I suppose the secret of his success is in his tremendous idleness which almost approaches the supernatural.
Lawrence Durrell