Lawrence Durrell Quotes

And even now she beats her head against the bars in the same old way and wonders if there is a bigger place the railroads run to from Chicago where maybe there is romance and big things and real dreams that never go smash.

A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age ... pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives. They don't want to be who they are any more. They want out. This list includes Thurston Howell the Third, Ann-Margret, the cat members of Rent, Václav Havel, space shuttle astronauts and Snuffleupagus. It's universal.

If all we seek is an escape, what does that say about the world we live in? That village, that city, that life? We are desperate with our dreams. What - oh, what - does that say?

Take me home," Snow White said. "Take me home instantly. If there is anything worse than being home, it is being out.

Waiting and hoping is a hard thing to do when you've already been waiting and hoping for almost as long as you can bear it.

I don't know why this world keeps turning, round and round. But I wish it would stop and let me off right now!

I'm just kind of sick of music. I don't know what I want to do. It's not that I feel suicidal or anything, but I just want to end this life. I just want to be somebody else now. Sometimes I feel like that. You always think, "If I just cut my hair really short and dye it brown and put on a little goatee, no one would know it was me, and I could..."

I pulled him closer to me, wrapping my arms around him, kissing him just as desperately as he was kissing me. Like if we could just love long enough and hard enough and deep enough, then the world outside would never, could never hurt us.

Ah! when will this long weary day have end, And lende me leave to come unto my love? - Epithalamion

He who has waited long enough, will wait forever. And there comes the hour when nothing more can happen and nobody more can come and all is ended but the waiting that knows itself in vain.

Some questions will ruin you if you are denied the answer long enough.

Such has often been my apathy, when objects long sought, and earnestly desired, were placed within my reach.

I was still owed an explanation, I thought, but so what? What good was it going to do me? It wouldn't have made me any happier. It was like scratching when you have chicken pox. You think it's going to help, but the itch moves over, and then moves over again. My itch suddenly felt miles away, and I couldn't have reached it with the longest arms in the world. Realizing that made me scared that I was going to be itchy forever, and I didn't want that.

... 'I've been doing everything for an awfully long time, and I've seen and lived as hard as I could, and it's been unbelievable, I tell you, unbelievable. But now I have the feeling everything's gliding away from me, and I don't remember, and I don't care, and yet now is right when I need it!'. [pp. 84-85]

I want to tear myself from this place, from this reality, rise up like a cloud and float away, melt into this humid summer night and dissolve somewhere far, over the hills. But I am here, my legs blocks of concrete, my lungs empty of air, my throat burning. There will be no floating away.

I cannot stop asking. If I could taste one sip of an answer, I could break out of this prison for drunks.

It almost made me long for the flying pig. --Percy

I want to take you away from this," I say, motioning around the kitchen, spastic. "From sushi and elves and... STUFF.

The anguished suspense of watching the lips you hunger for, framing the words, the death sentence, of sheer triteness!

I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box.

Well, you know how it feels if you begin hoping for something that you want desperately badly; you almost fight against the hope because it is too good to be true; you've been disappointed so often before.

Any happiness, no matter how brief, seemed better than the long, simmering torture of waking up day after day, knowing I could never have him.

With the lights out, It's less dangerous. Here we are now, Entertain us. I feel stupid, And contagious. Here we are now. Entertain us.

If things were half as bad as some people persist in believing, I'd have retired with a bottle of Scotch and a pistol a long time ago.

How long the night to the watchman, How long the road to the weary traveller, How long the wandering of many lives To the fool who misses the way.