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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
Vulgarity
Refinement
Vulgar
Tenderness
Achieve
Real
Great

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The realisation of one's own death is the point at which one becomes adult.
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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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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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Comedians are the nearest to suicide.
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Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine
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I see artists as a great battalion moving through paint, words, music towards cosmological interpretation.
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Art like life is an open secret.
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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 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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It only takes one match to ignite a haystack, or one remark to fire a mind.
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I suppose the secret of his success is in his tremendous idleness which almost approaches the supernatural.
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Everything really desirable has come about because of, or in spite of, wine!
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Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.
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We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.
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No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.
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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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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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Poverty is a great cutter-off and riches a great shutter-off.
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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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'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