Lawrence Durrell

"Its only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness."

"the confluent smallpox – invented perhaps as the cruellest remedy for human vanity (II)"

"The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of Spring. A sky of hot nude pearl until midday, crickets in sheltered places, and now the wind unpacking the great planes, ransacking the great planes… I have escaped to this island with a few books and the child — Melissa’s child. I do not know why I use the word ‘escape’. The villagers say jokingly that only a sick man would choose such a remote place to rebuild. Well, then, I have come here to heal myself, if you like to put it that way…."

"Its unthinkable not to love — youd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or youd have to be Philip Larkin."

"Old age is an insult. Its like being smacked."

"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)"

"I return link by link along the iron chains of memory to the city which we inhabited so briefly together:the city which used us as its flora-precipitated in us conflicts which were hers and which we mistook for our own: beloved Alexandria!"

"Im trying to die correctly, but its very difficult, you know."

"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."

"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."

"That house with its remoteness and the islands going down like soft gongs all the time into the amazing blue, and I shall never,never ever forget a youth spent there, discovered by accident. It was pure gold. But then of course … youth does mean happiness, it does mean love, and thats something you cant get over."