It’s only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness.
The most tender, the most tragic of illusions is perhaps to believe that our actions can add or subtract from the total quantity of good and evil in the world.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And morality is nothing if it is merely a form of good behavior.
The seeds of future events are carried within ourselves. They are implicit in us and unfold according to the laws of their own nature.
For all drama creates bondage, and the actor is only significant to the degree that he is bound.
None of the great religions have done more than exclude, throw out a long range of prohibitions. But prohibitions create the desire they are intended to cure. We of this Cabal say: indulge but refine. We are enlisting everything in order to make man’s wholeness match the wholeness of the universe – even pleasure, the destructive granulation of the mind in pleasure.
It was, if you like, the flirtation of minds prematurely exhausted by experience which seemed so much more dangerous than a love founded in sexual attraction.
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.
There is never enough light.” To which I responded without thought: “For women perhaps. We men are less exigent.
The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.” Lawrence Durrell in “Clea,” book three of the epic Alexandria Quartet – which I am reading for the third time since my early 20s... relishing its superb prose and enigmatic insights into the nature of love.
Some characters in the world are marked down for self-destruction, and to these no amount of rational argument can appeal.
Let us go to bed together and ignore the loutish reality of the world.
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.
First you have to know and understand intellectually what you want to do – then you have to sleepwalk a little to reach it.
If she ever knew me at all she must later have discovered that for those of us who feel deeply and who are at all conscious of the inextricable tangle of human thought there is only one response to be made – ironic tenderness and silence.
One always falls in love with the love-choice of the person one loves.
My friends must all have known all along. Yet nobody breathed a word. But of course, the truth is that nobody ever does breathe a word, nobody interferes, nobody whispers while the acrobat is on the tight-rope; they just sit and watch the spectacle, waiting only to be wise after the event.