Home > Work > Clea (The Alexandria Quartet #4)
1 " Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened. "
― Lawrence Durrell , Clea (The Alexandria Quartet #4)
2 " Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine "
3 " One word ‘love’ has to do service for so many different kinds of the same animal. "
4 " 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. "
5 " 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. "
6 " The seeds of future events are carried within ourselves. They are implicit in us and unfold according to the laws of their own nature "
7 " A million muffin-eating moralists were waiting, not for us, Brother Ass, but for the plucky and tedious Trollope! "
8 " A puritan culture’s conception of art is something which will endorse its morality and flatter its patriotism. "
9 " If you are born of the artist tribe it is a waste of time to try and function as a priest. You have to be faithful to your angle of vision, and at the same time recognise its partiality. There is a kind of perfection to be achieved in matching oneself to one's capacities at every level. This must, I imagine, do away with strivings, and with illusions too. "
10 " Words are the mirrors of our discontents merely; they contain all the huge unhatched eggs of the world's sorrows. "
11 " The oranges were more plentiful than usual that year. They glowed in their arbours of burnished green leaf like lanterns, flickering up there among the sunny woods. It was as if they were eager to celebrate our departure from the little island -- for at last the long-awaited message from Nessim had come, like a summons back to the Underworld. A message which was to draw me back inexorably to the one city which for me always hovered between illusion and reality, between the substance and the poetic images which its very name aroused in me.... Alexandria, the capital of memory! "
12 " We were like mourners at an invisible cenotaph during the two minutes’ silence which commemorates an irremediable failure of the human will. "
13 " This world represents the promise of a unique happiness which we are not well-enough equipped to grasp. "
14 " One learns nothing from those who return our love. "
15 " 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. "
16 " 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. "
17 " Let us go to bed together and ignore the loutish reality of the world. "
18 " He always puzzled me —except when I had him in my arms. "
19 " But then is not life itself a fairy-tale which we lose the power of apprehending as we grow? No matter. "
20 " (‘Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine’.) "
