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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
Achieve
Real
Great
Vulgarity
Refinement
Vulgar
Tenderness

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The effective in art is what rapes the emotions of your audience without nourishing its values.
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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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Shyness has laws you can only give yourself tragically to those who least understand.
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To write a poem is like trying to catch a lizard without its tail falling off.
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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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Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine
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Poverty is a great cutter-off and riches a great shutter-off.
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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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The cocktail party - as the name itself indicates - was originally invented by dogs. They are simply bottom-sniffings raised to the rank of formal ceremonies.
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Truth is what most contradicts itself.
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The realisation of one's own death is the point at which one becomes adult.
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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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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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Truth disappears with the telling of it.
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We are the children of our landscape it dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it.
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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
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They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures - and the best of them lead us not only outward in space, but inward as well.
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I have been thinking about the girl I met last night in the mirror: dark on the marble-ivory white: glossy black hair: deep suspiring eyes in which one's glances sink because they are nervous, curious, turned to sexual curiosity.
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Everything really desirable has come about because of, or in spite of, wine!
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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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