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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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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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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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Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment: only there does its satisfaction lie.
Lawrence Durrell
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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.
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 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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Shyness has laws you can only give yourself tragically to those who least understand.
Lawrence Durrell
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The effective in art is what rapes the emotions of your audience without nourishing its values.
Lawrence Durrell
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Truth is a woman. That is why it is enigmatic.
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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No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.
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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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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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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Life, the raw material, is only lived in potentia until the artist deploys it in his work.
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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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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Religion is simply art bastardized out of all recognition.
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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People only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it.
Lawrence Durrell