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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.

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
Tenderness
Achieve
Real
Great
Vulgarity
Refinement
Vulgar

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An idea is like a rare bird which cannot be seen. What one sees is the trembling of the branch it has just left.
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The realisation of one's own death is the point at which one becomes adult.
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I see artists as a great battalion moving through paint, words, music towards cosmological interpretation.
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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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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.
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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.
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History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.
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Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine
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Life, the raw material, is only lived in potentia until the artist deploys it in his work.
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Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment: only there does its satisfaction lie.
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Shyness has laws you can only give yourself tragically to those who least understand.
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Art like life is an open secret.
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The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you.
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Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.
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People only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it.
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You see, nothing matters except pleasure - which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.
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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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Odd, isn't it? He really was the right man for her in a sort of way but then as you know, it is a law of love that the so-called 'right' person always comes to soon or too late.
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It's unthinkable not to love - you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin.
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I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.
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