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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

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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
Perhaps
Fiction
Rest
Fictions
Rather
Manufacture
Desire
Sickness
Cannot
Content
Truth
Bear
Bears

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Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine
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It’s only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness.
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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.
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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.
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To write a poem is like trying to catch a lizard without its tail falling off.
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To be the equal of reality you must learn how to ignore it without danger.
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Shyness has laws you can only give yourself tragically to those who least understand.
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Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.
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Truth is a woman. That is why it is enigmatic.
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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.
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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.
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It is not peace we seek but meaning.
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The steward, according to custom, had stopped all the clocks. This, in the language of Narouz, said Your stay with us is so brief, let us not be reminded of the flight of the hours.
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All culture corrupts, but French culture corrupts absolutely.
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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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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
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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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Truth is what most contradicts itself.
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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Everything really desirable has come about because of, or in spite of, wine!
Lawrence Durrell