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Quotes from The Alexandria Quartet — Lawrence Durrell

1912–1990 England

← All quotes by Lawrence Durrell

13 quotes

Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.

The Alexandria Quartet (1957)

A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.

The Alexandria Quartet (1957)

There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.

The Alexandria Quartet (1957)

A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.

The Alexandria Quartet (1957)

No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.

The Alexandria Quartet (1957)

Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment; only there does its satisfaction lie.

The Alexandria Quartet (1957)

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

The Alexandria Quartet (1957)

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.

The Alexandria Quartet (1957)

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)

The Alexandria Quartet (1957)

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)

The Alexandria Quartet (1957)

In French the truth of passion stood up coldly and cruelly to the scrutiny of human experience. In his own curious phrase he [Pursewarden] had always qualified it as 'an unsniggerable language'. (VIII)

The Alexandria Quartet (1957)

The Copts — the only branch of the Christian Church which was thoroughly integrated into the Orient! But then your good Bishop of Salisbury openly said he considered these oriental Christians as worse than infidels, and your Crusaders massacred them joyfully.

The Alexandria Quartet (1957)

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.

The Alexandria Quartet (1957)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Lawrence Durrell (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.