Frases de Lawrence Durrell

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“Um poema é o que acontece quando uma ansiedade encontra uma técnica.”

“Procuramos preencher o vazio da nossa individualidade e por um breve momento desfrutamos da ilusão de estar completos. Mas é só uma ilusão. O amor une e depois divide.”

“É necessária muita energia e muita neurose para escrever um romance. Se fôssemos realmente sensatos, faríamos outra coisa.”

“Um bom escritor não precisa de biografias. Toda a sua história está em suas obras.”

“Tal como todos os jovens, propunha-me ser um gênio, mas, felizmente, interveio o riso.”

“As melhores cartas de amor de uma mulher são as que escreve ao homem que engana.”

“A viagem pode ser uma das formas mais satisfatórias de introspecção.”

“Uma ideia pode chegar à mente mas não ter ainda encontrado os lábios.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“the confluent smallpox - invented perhaps as the cruellest remedy for human vanity”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 that's something you can't get over.”

“He had at last discovered that love had no pith in it, and that the projection of one own's feelings upon the images of a beloved was in the long run, an act of self-mutilation.”

“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!”

“Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.”

“Brazil is bigger than Europe, wilder than Africa, and weirder than Baffin Land.”

“It's only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness.”

“His profession [ diplomacy ] — offered him something like a long Jesuitical training in self-deception which enabled him to present an ever more highly polished surface to the world without deepening his human experience [-] for he lived surrounded by his ambitious and sycophantic fellows who taught him only how to excel in forms of address, and the elaborate kindnesses which, in pleasing, pave the way to advancement.”

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

“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.”

“It's unthinkable not to love — you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin.”

“Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.”

“For the body is only the outer periphery of the spirit, its solid part.”