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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

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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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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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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We are the children of our landscape it dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it.
Lawrence Durrell
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Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.
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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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.
Lawrence Durrell
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The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.
Lawrence Durrell
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History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.
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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Everything really desirable has come about because of, or in spite of, wine!
Lawrence Durrell
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Poverty is a great cutter-off and riches a great shutter-off.
Lawrence Durrell
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Life is like a cucumber. One minute it's in your hand, the next it's up you ass.
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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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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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.
Lawrence Durrell
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It only takes one match to ignite a haystack, or one remark to fire a mind.
Lawrence Durrell
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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.
Lawrence Durrell
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Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.
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