Lawrence Durrell (1912 – 1990)
Considered a British novelist, poet, dramatist and travel writer, even though it was discovered posthumously that he never actually held British citizenship.
There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.
Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.
Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.
Subconsciously he knew too, that the oriental woman is not a sensualist in the European sense; there is nothing mawkish in her constitution. Her true obsessions are power, politics and possessions - however much she might deny it. The sex ticks on in the mind, but its motions are warmed by the kinetic brutalities of money. (X)
A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.
Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.
I think often, and never without a certain fear of Nessim's love for Justine. [-] It coloured his unhappiness with a kind of ecstasy [-] Yet one touch of humour would have saved him from such dreadful comprehensive suffering.
It's only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness.
Brazil is bigger than Europe, wilder than Africa, and weirder than Baffin Land.
Then he saw that she was blind, her face slightly upcast to her companion's in the manner of those whose expressions never fully attain their target - the eyes of another. (II)
Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.
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 (I)
A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.
No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.
Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment; only there does its satisfaction lie.
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.
It's unthinkable not to love — you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin.
here was Kenilworth now heading the new department concerned with Personnel [-] one of those blank administrative constructs which offered no openings into the world of policy. A dead end. [-] he would soon develop the negative powers of obstruction which always derive from a sense of failure. (IV)
The appalling thing is the degree of charity women are capable of. You see it all the time ... love lavished on absolute fools. Love's a charity ward, you know.
Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will—whatever we may think.