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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
Great
Vulgarity
Refinement
Vulgar
Tenderness
Achieve
Real

More quotes by Lawrence Durrell

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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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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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How grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work.
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A diary is the last place to go if you wish to seek the truth about a person. Nobody dares to make the final confession to themselves on paper: or at least, not about love.
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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 takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.
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There is no pain compared to that of loving a woman who makes her body accessible to one and yet who is incapable of delivering her true self -- because she does not know where to find it.
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I see artists as a great battalion moving through paint, words, music towards cosmological interpretation.
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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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Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.
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History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.
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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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Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment: only there does its satisfaction lie.
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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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To write a poem is like trying to catch a lizard without its tail falling off.
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Truth is what most contradicts itself.
Lawrence Durrell
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Religion is simply art bastardized out of all recognition.
Lawrence Durrell
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We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.
Lawrence Durrell
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Shyness has laws you can only give yourself tragically to those who least understand.
Lawrence Durrell
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No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.
Lawrence Durrell