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Justine (The Alexandria Quartet #1) QUOTES

Justine (The Alexandria Quartet #1) QUOTES

1 " I suppose the secret of his success is in his tremendous idleness which almost approaches the supernatural. "

― Lawrence Durrell , Justine (The Alexandria Quartet #1)

2 " People only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it. "

― Lawrence Durrell , Justine (The Alexandria Quartet #1)

3 " 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. "

― Lawrence Durrell , Justine (The Alexandria Quartet #1)

4 " Art—the meaning of the pattern of our common actions in reality. The cloth-of-gold that hides behind the sackcloth of reality, forced out by the pain of human memory. "

― Lawrence Durrell , Justine (The Alexandria Quartet #1)

5 " 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. "

― Lawrence Durrell , Justine (The Alexandria Quartet #1)

6 " Poverty is a great cutter-off and riches a great shutter-off. "

― Lawrence Durrell , Justine (The Alexandria Quartet #1)

7 " Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us? "

― Lawrence Durrell , Justine (The Alexandria Quartet #1)

8 " It is hard to fight with one's heart's desires; whatever it wishes to get, it purchases at the cost of the soul. "

― Lawrence Durrell , Justine (The Alexandria Quartet #1)

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

― Lawrence Durrell , Justine (The Alexandria Quartet #1)

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

― Lawrence Durrell , Justine (The Alexandria Quartet #1)

11 " We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd. "

― Lawrence Durrell , Justine (The Alexandria Quartet #1)

12 " Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me, and then show me the place where he was hanged. "

― Lawrence Durrell , Justine (The Alexandria Quartet #1)

13 " I am quite alone. I am neither happy nor unhappy; I lie suspended like a hair or a feather in the cloudy mixtures of memory. "

― Lawrence Durrell , Justine (The Alexandria Quartet #1)

14 " These are the moments which are not calculable, and cannot be assessed in words; they live on in the solution of memory, like wonderful creatures, unique of their own kind, dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean. "

― Lawrence Durrell , Justine (The Alexandria Quartet #1)

15 " The loved object is simply one that has shared an experience at the same moment of time, narcissistically; and 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. All this may precede the first look, kiss, or touch; precede ambition, pride, or envy; precede the first declarations which mark the turning point—for from here love degenerates into habit, possession, and back to loneliness. "

― Lawrence Durrell , Justine (The Alexandria Quartet #1)

16 " She took kisses like so many coats of paint […] how long and how vainly I searched for excuses which might make her amorality if not palatable at lest understandable. I realize now the time I wasted in this way; instead of enjoying her and turning aside from these preoccupations with the thought, ‘She is untrustworthy as she is beautiful. She takes love as plants do water, lightly, thoughtlessly. "

― Lawrence Durrell , Justine (The Alexandria Quartet #1)

17 " I have been thinking about the girl I met last night in the mirror: dark on the marble-ivory white: glossy black hair: deep suspiring eyes in which one's glances sink because they are nervous, curious, turned to sexual curiosity. "

― Lawrence Durrell , Justine (The Alexandria Quartet #1)

18 " I have done so many things in my life," she said to the mirror. "Evil things, perhaps. But never unattentively, never wastefully...was I wrong? "

― Lawrence Durrell , Justine (The Alexandria Quartet #1)

19 " In these days Melissa's absorbed and provoking gentleness had all the qualities of a rediscovered youth. Her long uncertain fingers - I used to feel them moving over my face when she thought I slept, as if to memorize the happiness we had shared. In her there was a pliancy, a resilience which was Oriental - a passion to serve. My shabby clothes - the way she picked up a dirty shirt seemed to engulf it with an overflowing solicitude; in the morning I found my razor beautifully cleaned and even the toothpaste laid upon the brush in readiness. Her care for me was a goad, provoking me to give my life some sort of shape and style that might match the simplicity of hers. Of her experiences in love she would never speak, turning from them with a weariness and distaste which suggested that they had been born of necessity rather than desire. She paid me the comlpiment of saying: "For the first time I am not afraid to be light-headed or foolish with a man". "

― Lawrence Durrell , Justine (The Alexandria Quartet #1)

20 " He thought and suffered a good deal but he lacked the resolution to dare--the first requisite of a practitioner. "

― Lawrence Durrell , Justine (The Alexandria Quartet #1)