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Let us define 'man' as a poet perpetually conspiring against himself.

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
Conspiring
Perpetually
Define
Poet
Men

More quotes by 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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Comedians are the nearest to suicide.
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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Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.
Lawrence Durrell
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Truth disappears with the telling of it.
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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Poverty is a great cutter-off and riches a great shutter-off.
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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He thought and suffered a good deal but he lacked the resolution to dare--the first requisite of a practitioner.
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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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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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.
Lawrence Durrell
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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.
Lawrence Durrell
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We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.
Lawrence Durrell
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To write a poem is like trying to catch a lizard without its tail falling off.
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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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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Life, the raw material, is only lived in potentia until the artist deploys it in his work.
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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All culture corrupts, but French culture corrupts absolutely.
Lawrence Durrell