The Alexandria Quartet
Lawrence Durrell
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Gamblers and lovers really play to lose.”
“Science is the poetry of the intellect and poetry the science of the heart's affections.”
“You see, nothing matters except pleasure - which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.”
“The world is like a cucumber—today it's in your hand, tomorrow up your arse.”
“Art like life is an open secret.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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’.*”
“Youth is the age of despairs.”
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Book Keywords:
happiness, tragedy, alexandra-quartet, life, self-awareness, lawrence-durrell, art, pleasure, justine
