“Gamblers and lovers really play to lose.”
― Lawrence Durrell, quote from The Alexandria Quartet
“Science is the poetry of the intellect and poetry the science of the heart's affections.”
― Lawrence Durrell, quote from The Alexandria Quartet
“Life is like a cucumber. One minute it's in your hand, the next it's up you ass.”
― Lawrence Durrell, quote from The Alexandria Quartet
“Art like life is an open secret.”
― Lawrence Durrell, quote from The Alexandria Quartet
“You see, nothing matters except pleasure - which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.”
― Lawrence Durrell, quote from The Alexandria Quartet
“I realized then the truth about all love: that it is an absolute which takes all or forfeits all. The other feelings, compassion, tenderness and so on, exist only on the periphery and belong on the constructions of society and habit. But she herself- austere and merciless Aphrodite-is a pagan. it is not our brains or instincts which she picks-but our very bones.”
― Lawrence Durrell, quote from The Alexandria Quartet
“There are only three things to be done with a woman’ said Clea once. ‘You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.”
― Lawrence Durrell, quote from The Alexandria Quartet
“the desire to be near the beloved object is at first not due to the idea of possessing it, but simply to let the two experiences compare themselves, like reflections in different mirrors... For from here love degenerates into habit, possession, and back to loneliness.”
― Lawrence Durrell, quote from The Alexandria Quartet
“In her, as an Alexandrian, licence was in a curious way a form of self-abnegation, a travesty of freedom; and if I saw her as an exemplar of the city it was not of Alexandria, or Plotinus that I was forced to think, but of the sad thirtieth child of Valentinus who fell, ‘not like Lucifer by rebelling against God, but by desiring too ardently to be united to him’.*”
― Lawrence Durrell, quote from The Alexandria Quartet
“Youth is the age of despairs.”
― Lawrence Durrell, quote from The Alexandria Quartet
“She gave me the impression of someone engaged in giving a series of savage caricatures of herself — but this is common to most lonely people who feel that their true self can find no correspondence in another.”
― Lawrence Durrell, quote from The Alexandria Quartet
“There was some unresolved inner knot which she wished to untie and which was quite beyond my skill as a lover or a friend. Of course. Of course. I knew as much as could be known of the psychopathology of hysteria at that time.”
― Lawrence Durrell, quote from The Alexandria Quartet
“This is what is meant by possession - to be passionately at war for the qualities in one another to contend for the treasures of each other’s personalities. But how can such a war be anything but destructive and hopeless?”
― Lawrence Durrell, quote from The Alexandria Quartet
“She looked like a statue of pride hanging its head.”
― Lawrence Durrell, quote from The Alexandria Quartet
“that only there, in the silences of the painter or the writer can reality be reordered, reworked and made to show its significant side. Our common actions in reality are simply the sackcloth covering which hides the cloth-of-gold — the meaning of the pattern. 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, quote from The Alexandria Quartet
“And I saw her as a sad thirtieth child of Valentine that fell, not as Lucifer rebelling against God, but because she too passionately wanted to be united with him! All things in excess become sin.”
― Lawrence Durrell, quote from The Alexandria Quartet
“It was cold in the street and I crossed to the lighted blaze of shops in Rue Fuad. In a grocer’s window I saw a small tin of olives with the name Orvieto on it, and overcome by a sudden longing to be on the right side of the Mediterranean, entered the shop: bought it: had it opened there and then: and sitting down at a marble table in that gruesome light I began to eat Italy, its dark scorched flesh, hand-modelled spring soil, dedicated vines. I felt that Melissa would never understand this. I should have to pretend I had lost the money. I did not see at first the great car which she had abandoned in the street with its engine running. She came into the shop with swift and resolute suddenness and said, with the air of authority that Lesbians, or women with money, assume with the obviously indigent: ‘What did you mean by your remark about the antinomian nature of irony?’ — or some such sally which I have forgotten.”
― Lawrence Durrell, quote from The Alexandria Quartet
“she had been raped by one of her relations. One cannot help smiling at the commonplaceness of the thought.”
― Lawrence Durrell, quote from The Alexandria Quartet
“Basle, Zurich, Baden, Paris — the flickering of steel rails over the arterial systems of Europe’s body: steel ganglia meeting and dividing away across mountains and valleys.”
― Lawrence Durrell, quote from The Alexandria Quartet
“But there are more than five sexes and only demotic Greek seems to distinguish among them.”
― Lawrence Durrell, quote from The Alexandria Quartet
“Suddenly at the end of the great couloir my vision is sharpened by a pale disjunctive shudder as a bar of buttercup-yellow thickening gradually to a ray falls slowly through the dark masses of cloud to the east. The ripple and flurry of the invisible colonies of birds around us increases. Slowly, painfully, like a half-open door the dawn is upon us, forcing back the darkness. A minute more and a stairway of soft kingcups slides smoothly down out of heaven to touch in our horizons, to give eye and mind an orientation in space which it has been lacking.”
― Lawrence Durrell, quote from The Alexandria Quartet
“There are some characters in this world who are marked down for self-destruction, and to these no amount of rational argument can appeal. For my part Justine always reminded me of a somnambulist discovered treading the perilous leads of a high tower; any attempt to wake her with a shout might lead to disaster. One could only follow her silently in the hope of guiding her gradually away from the great shadowy drops which loomed up on every side. But by some curious paradox it was these”
― Lawrence Durrell, quote from The Alexandria Quartet
“There is never enough light.” To which I responded without thought: “For women perhaps. We men are less exigent.”
― Lawrence Durrell, quote from The Alexandria Quartet
“out of the trembling pearly edges of the sky there swam slowly a high cluster of reddish basalt blocks, carved into the vague semblance (like a face in the fire) of a sphinx tortured by thirst; and there, gibbering in the dark shade of a rock, the little party waited to conduct them to the Sheik’s tents — four tall lean men, made of brown paper, whose voices cracked at the edges of meaning with thirst, and whose laughter was like fury unleashed. To them they rode — into the embrace of arms like dry sticks and the thorny clicking of an unfamiliar Arabic in which Narouz did all the talking and explaining.”
― Lawrence Durrell, quote from The Alexandria Quartet
“A drunken whore walks in a dark street at night, shedding snatches of song like petals. Was it in this that Anthony heard the heart-numbing strains of the great music which persuaded him to surrender for ever to the city he loved? The”
― Lawrence Durrell, quote from The Alexandria Quartet
“These notes, however they may be read, are intended only as a painstaking affectionate commentary on a world into which I have been born to share my most solitary moments — those of coitus — with Justine. I can get no nearer to the truth.”
― Lawrence Durrell, quote from The Alexandria Quartet
“A není nové země, příteli, žádného nového moře; poněvadž město půjde pořád s tebou,
navěky budeš bloudit po stejných ulicích,
na stejných předměstích ducha ustydnou tvoje sny a v stejném domě pak i zešedivíš -
město je vězení.
Odejít nelze nikam, vždycky se ocitneš
znovu na tomto místě, a žádná loď tě neodveze
od tebe samotného. Pošetilče, tys ještě nepochopil,
že jak jsi promarnil svůj život tady
na tomto kousku světa, je stejně promarněný
i všude jinde - na celé širé zemi?”
― Lawrence Durrell, quote from The Alexandria Quartet
“the indifference of the natural world to the constructions of art”
― Lawrence Durrell, quote from The Alexandria Quartet
“Idle’ she writes ‘to imagine falling in love as a correspondence of minds, of thoughts; it is a simultaneous firing of two spirits engaged in the autonomous act of growing up. And the sensation is of something having noiselessly exploded inside each of them. Around this event, dazed and preoccupied, the lover moves examining his or her own experience; her gratitude alone, stretching away towards a mistaken donor, creates the illusion that she communicates with her fellow, but this is false. The loved object is simply one that has shared an experience at the same moment of time, narcissistically; and the desire to be near the beloved object is at first not due to the idea of possessing it, but simply to let the two experiences compare themselves, like reflections in different mirrors. All this may precede the first look, kiss, or touch; precede ambition, pride or envy; precede the first declarations which mark the turning point — for from here love degenerates into habit, possession, and back to loneliness.”
― Lawrence Durrell, quote from The Alexandria Quartet
“The telephone is a modern symbol for communications which never take place”
― Lawrence Durrell, quote from The Alexandria Quartet
Lawrence Durrell
Born place: in Jalandhar, India
Born date February 27, 1912
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“The return of the voices would end in a migraine that made my whole body throb. I could do nothing except lie in a blacked-out room waiting for the voices to get infected by the pains in my head and clear off.
Knowing I was different with my OCD, anorexia and the voices that no one else seemed to hear made me feel isolated, disconnected. I took everything too seriously. I analysed things to death. I turned every word, and the intonation of every word over in my mind trying to decide exactly what it meant, whether there was a subtext or an implied criticism. I tried to recall the expressions on people’s faces, how those expressions changed, what they meant, whether what they said and the look on their faces matched and were therefore genuine or whether it was a sham, the kind word touched by irony or sarcasm, the smile that means pity.
When people looked at me closely could they see the little girl in my head, being abused in those pornographic clips projected behind my eyes?
That is what I would often be thinking and such thoughts ate away at the façade of self-confidence I was constantly raising and repairing.
(describing dissociative identity disorder/mpd symptoms)”
― quote from Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind
“What is certain is that the world has got beyond the stage at which one may affect modesty and maidenly shame, and I think that the world is too old a duffer to assume to be childish and maidenly without becoming ridiculous.
Since its marriage to civilization society has forfeited its right to be ingenuous and prudish. There is a blush which beseems the bride as she is being bedded, which would be out of place on the morrow; for the young wife mayhap remembers no more what it is to be a girl, or, if she does remember it, it is very indecent, and seriously compromises the reputation of the husband.”
― Théophile Gautier, quote from Mademoiselle de Maupin
“Where are the people?” resumed the little prince at last. “It’s a little lonely in the desert…” “It is lonely when you’re among people, too,” said the snake.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, quote from Der kleine Prinz
“Finally, people have to actually purchase it. It doesn’t matter how good a product is if, in the end, nobody uses it.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition (Revised)
“When you're in a relationship with someone who's selfish, what keeps you in it is the fact that when they shine on you, it's this souped-up shine. And you feel like you're in the club. And you don't even know what club it is. You just know you want to stay in it.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories
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