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.
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects the complexity of loving someone who is beautiful yet untrustworthy, highlighting the conflict between desire and morality.
In this quote, Lawrence Durrell captures the paradox of falling for someone whose beauty is overshadowed by their moral ambiguity. The narrator expresses regret over the time spent seeking rationalizations for their lover's questionable actions instead of fully embracing the relationship as it is. This acknowledgment of love's complicated nature illustrates how our judgments can cloud our experiences, and how sometimes, one must accept the imperfections of a beloved to truly appreciate the moments shared.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a talk about the complexities of love and trust, this quote can exemplify the challenges people face in romantic relationships.
More from Lawrence Durrell
All quotes →I had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time - those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything.
Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.
The whole Mediterranean, the sculpture, the palm, the gold beads, the bearded heroes, the wine, the ideas, the ships, the moonlight, the winged gorgons, the bronze men, the philosophers - all of it seems to rise in the sour, pungent taste of these black olives between the teeth. A taste older than meat, older than wine. A taste as old as cold water.
The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you.
Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.
Similar quotes
It is the deep urge to be one with the whole, the deep urge to dissolve I and thou into one unity. Love is that because we are separated from our own source, out of that separation the desire arises to fall back into the whole, to become one with it.
I am the lover's gift; I am the wedding wreath; I am the memory of a moment of happiness; I am the last gift of the living to the dead; I am a part of joy and a part of sorrow.
I find flaws attractive. I find scars attractive.
All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding yet superior power, stupider and steadier than herself. It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream
Our souls sit close and silently within, And their own web from their own entrails spin; And when eyes meet far off, our sense is such, That, spider-like, we feel the tenderest touch.
You’re really cute, Midori,” I corrected myself. “What do you mean really cute?” “So cute the mountains crumble and the oceans dry up.