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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
Refinement
Vulgar
Tenderness
Achieve
Real
Great
Vulgarity

More quotes by 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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A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.
Lawrence Durrell
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Comedians are the nearest to suicide.
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It is not peace we seek but meaning.
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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History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.
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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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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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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You see, nothing matters except pleasure - which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.
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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I see artists as a great battalion moving through paint, words, music towards cosmological interpretation.
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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How grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work.
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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Life, the raw material, is only lived in potentia until the artist deploys it in his work.
Lawrence Durrell
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No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.
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
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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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Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.
Lawrence Durrell