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3773141
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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.
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Lawrence Durrell |
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73ba08c
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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 do the ordinary people, but to fulfill it in its true potential - the imagination.
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creativity
escapism
fate
love
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Lawrence Durrell |
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4381e72
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Any concentration of the will displaces life and gives it bias in motion. Reality, he believed, was always trying to copy the imagination of man, from which it derived.
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Lawrence Durrell |
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8922eba
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There is nothing stranger than to love somebody who is mad, or who is intermittently so. The weight, the strain, the anxiety is a heavy load to bear - if only because among these confusional states and hysterias loom dreadful probabilities like suicide or murder. It shakes one's hold also on one's own grasp of reality; one realises how precariously we manage
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Lawrence Durrell |
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f9dee5c
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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.
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Lawrence Durrell |
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b76d7a7
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He hablado de la inutilidad del arte, pero no he dicho la verdad sobre el consuelo que procura.
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Lawrence Durrell |
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ae584d6
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Her efforts to achieve herself had led her always towards, and not away from him.
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Lawrence Durrell |
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3a9b394
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But that is what islands are for; they are places where different destinies can meet and intersect in the full isolation of time.
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islands
places
time
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Lawrence Durrell |
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3440055
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I love the French edition with its uncut pages. I would not want a reader too lazy to use a knife on me.
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knife
uncut
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Lawrence Durrell |
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a8fe027
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Each of our five senses contains an art.
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Lawrence Durrell |
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e383757
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When one is fully extended by day and exhausted every evening one lives differently, without the weight of yesterday or tomorrow on one's shoulders. I
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Lawrence Durrell |
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47ff048
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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'.*
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Lawrence Durrell |
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98ae587
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n l'Hdth lb`yd@ tktsb wqd Hwlth wGyrth ldhkr@ lm`nan mSqwl l'nh tr~ fy `zlth, mfSwl@ `n ltfSyl lsbq@ wllHq@ `n khywT lzmn wlffth. n mmthly l'Hdth y`nwn 'yDan ltHwyl wltGyr, wyGTswn fy bT, '`mq f'`mq fy mHyT ldhkr@ kl'jsd mthql@, wyjdwn `nd kl mstw~ fy lqlb lnsny tqdyran jdydan, wtqyyman jdydan
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Lawrence Durrell |
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8c676c7
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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.
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Lawrence Durrell |
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689731a
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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. They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures - and the best of them lead us not only outwards in space, but inwards as well. Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection....
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journeys
travel
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Lawrence Durrell |
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e9830f4
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Shyness has laws: you can only give yourself, tragically, to those who least understand.
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Lawrence Durrell |
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0943db9
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nny `tqd 'n l'Hdth m hy l tfsyr lmsh`rn, ymkn n tqwdn wHd@ mnh l~ l'khr~. lzmn yHmln l~ l'mm bqw@ tlk lmsh`r lty t`ysh fy '`mqn wlty l n`y `nh l lqlyl.
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Lawrence Durrell |
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52f5855
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'fkr fy 'n lmdyn@ klnsn tjm` mywlh wshhwth wmkhwfh. nh tnmw Ht~ tblG lnDj wtqdm 'nbyh, thm tnHdr l~ ltbld 'w lshykhwkh@ 'w lwHd@ why 'sw' mn klyhm. wl'Hy l yzln yjlsn `l~ qr`@ lTryq, l ydryn 'n lmdyn@ tmwt, yjlsn kltmthyl lmnSwb@ ysndn lZlm, walam lmstqbl trqd fwq jfwnhn, trqb fy yqZ@, lbHthyn `n lkhlwd `br kl tnbw't lzmn
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Lawrence Durrell |
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29545dc
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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.
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Lawrence Durrell |
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50c36cf
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Underneath an artist's preoccupations with sex, society, religion, etc. (all the staple abstractions that allow the forebrain to chatter) there is a soul tortured beyond endurance by the lack of tenderness in the world.
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religion
sex
society
soul
tenderness
torture
tortured-soul
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Lawrence Durrell |
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678edf5
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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?
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Lawrence Durrell |
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8687e5c
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A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and these findings about the penetralia of sexual life gave the writer a sort of justification for a native acerbity. Afterwards, when love left him in the lurch and he became the wounded man who was such a trial to us all, he took refuge in a laughter and cynicism which were far from his real nature - a secretive one. He had at last discovered that love had no pith in it, and that the projection of ..
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Lawrence Durrell |
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4a0f448
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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.
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lucifer
passion
sin
valentine
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Lawrence Durrell |
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cb89dfb
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For years one has to put up with the feeling that people do not care, really care, about one; then one day with growing alarm, one realizes that it is God who does not care; and not merely that he does not care, he does not care one way or the other.
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Lawrence Durrell |
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4fbb4bb
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For all drama creates bondage, and the actor is only significant to the degree that he is bound.
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Lawrence Durrell |
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bdfd32d
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But there are more than five sexes and only demotic Greek seems to distinguish among them.
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Lawrence Durrell |
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138bb9e
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She looked like a statue of pride hanging its head.
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Lawrence Durrell |
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8678481
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El dolor mismo es el unico elemento de la memoria; porque el placer termina en si mismo
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Lawrence Durrell |
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9946fef
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Cuesta mucho luchar contra el deseo del corazon; todo lo que quiere obtener, lo compra al precio del alma.
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Lawrence Durrell |
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3754db7
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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, b..
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Lawrence Durrell |
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8e3e16d
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Is it any wonder that I absent-mindedly take the entrance marked Aliens Only whenever I enter?
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Lawrence Durrell |
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8a0b441
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Africa, which they had somehow visualized as an extension of Europe -- an extension of terms, of references to a definitive past -- had already asserted itself as something different: a forbidding darkness where the croaking ravens matched the dry exclamations of spiritless men, and rationed laughter fashioned from breath simply the chattering of baboons. Sometimes they captured someone -- a solitary frightened man out hunting hares -- and ..
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Lawrence Durrell |
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9b80664
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Slowly the bluish spring moon climbs the houses, sliding up the minarets into the clicking palm-trees, and with it the city seems to uncurl like some hibernating animal dug out of its winter earth, to stretch and begin to drink in the music of the three-day festival.
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Lawrence Durrell |
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ed034b1
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A good doctor, and in a special sense the psychologist, makes it quite deliberately, slightly harder for the patient to recover too easily. You do this to see if his psyche has any real bounce in it, for the secret of healing is in the patient and not the doctor.
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Lawrence Durrell |
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628a031
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With all its imperfections lying heavy on its head, I can't help being attached to it because in the writing of it I first heard the sound of my own voice, lame and halting perhaps, but nevertheless my very own. This is an experience no artist ever forgets --the birth cry of a newly born baby of letters, the genuine article.
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Lawrence Durrell |
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b231249
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Landscape-tones: brown to bronze, steep skyline, low cloud, pearl ground with shadowed oyster and violet reflections. The lion-dust of desert: prophets' tombs turned to zinc and copper at sunset on the ancient lake.
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Lawrence Durrell |
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25d2dd7
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Neden guluyorsun? En ciddi seylere bile her zaman gulersin. Ah, oyle ya, uzulmen mi gerekir?" Beni biraz olsun tanisaydi, bizim gibi her seyi derinlemesine duyan, insan dusuncesinin icinden cikilmaz dugumunun tam anlamiyla bilincinde olan insanlar icin verilecek tek bir yanit -alayli bir sevecenlik ve suskunluk- oldugunu daha sonra kendisi de anlardi."
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Lawrence Durrell |
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d910757
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and all at once it seemed that past and present had joined again without any divisions in it, and that all my memories and impressions had ordered themselves into one complete pattern whose metaphor was always the shining city of the disinherited -- a city now trying softly to spread the sticky prismatic wings of a new-born dragonfly on the night.
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Lawrence Durrell |
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81fbf02
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No one thing can explain everything; though everything can illuminate something. God, I must be still drunk. If God were anything he would be an art. Sculpture or medicine. But the immense extension of knowledge in this our age, the growth of new sciences, makes it almost impossible for us to digest the available flavours and put them to use.
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Lawrence Durrell |
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c64556a
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man is only an extension of the spirit of place.
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Lawrence Durrell |
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032a012
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And morality is nothing if it is merely a form of good behavior.
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Lawrence Durrell |
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af78f22
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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 vin..
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Lawrence Durrell |
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bbc9712
|
The seeds of future events are carried within ourselves. They are implicit in us and unfold according to the laws of their own nature
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Lawrence Durrell |
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402fa1f
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The real teacher is endurance.
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Lawrence Durrell |