Quote

An idea is like a rare bird which cannot be seen. What one sees is the trembling of the branch it has just left.

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
Bird
Seen
Idea
Left
Trembling
Cannot
Branch
Ideas
Branches
Like
Rare
Sees

More quotes by Lawrence Durrell

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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
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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.
Lawrence Durrell
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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.
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 is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine
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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A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.
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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The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.
Lawrence Durrell
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Frost in January minus 20 for a week. Dead birds frozen on the branch—they fall with the first thaw like ripe fruit—death-ripened. We shall all end like them—just a stain in the snow.
Lawrence Durrell
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All culture corrupts, but French culture corrupts absolutely.
Lawrence Durrell
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Let us define 'man' as a poet perpetually conspiring against himself.
Lawrence Durrell
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I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.
Lawrence Durrell
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Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.
Lawrence Durrell
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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.
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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'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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Art like life is an open secret.
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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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