Lawrence Durrell

“Other countries may offer you discoveries in manners or lore or landscape; Greece offers you something harder - the discovery of yourself.”

“A woman's best protection is a little money of her own.”

“I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.”

“Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.”

“Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.”

“Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.”

“The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.”

“Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?”

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

“History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.”

“To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.”

“A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.”

“We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.”

“We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behaviour and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it.”

“It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.”

“To be an artist means never to avert one's eyes.”