pbobrit's review against another edition
4.0
My first foray into the world of Durrell, and I liked it. A contemporary and friend of Henry Miller, this book does share some of the feel of Miller's work, but in my opinion has a more subtle, poetic quality. This is the first of the Alexandria Quartet, 4 books set in the city of the same name between WWI and II. It follows a group of friends on their exploits and misadventures. The characters are all well formed, believable and sympathetic, but not all likable. He paints a great portrait of the city which becomes a character in it's own right. Great book, definitely a read for fans of Miller, Nin etc.
virginiacjacobs's review against another edition
2.0
Honestly, I didn't care for this book, which is a shame, since I had heard good things about it. The language was actually quite good, but either nothing happened, or I didn't actually notice what happened. I don't think I'm going to read the rest of the quartet; at least not right now.
bel_benincasa's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
mrssoule's review against another edition
2.0
This book creates lots of Atmosphere and not much else. Reminded me of [b:A Spy in the House of Love|248665|A Spy in the House of Love|Anaïs Nin|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1266505764s/248665.jpg|624215]. Pretentious and misses the mark.
anjsi's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
melissadoe1's review against another edition
Realized I wasn't truly engaged, and wasn't really sure what the story was about.
lookhome's review against another edition
5.0
'I hunt everywhere for a life that is worth living. Perhaps if I could die or go mad it would provide a focus for all the feelings I have which find no proper outlet' (68)
Durrell's [b:Justine|13037|Justine (The Alexandria Quartet #1)|Lawrence Durrell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1428544115l/13037._SY75_.jpg|45387] is a beautiful, lyrical and heartbreaking tale of loss and lust.
In it, he drops his readers into a compelling love quadrangle set in an Alexandria populated by artists, swindlers and philosophers.
It is a novel about the complexities of identity and friendship, of compulsion and passion and most importantly, the understandable and yet inexplicable actions of those who are unable to express love.
Durrell's characters are characterised by their flaws and their ability to accept themselves as such as well as each other. Though each is arguably broken in their own way, each one of his characters seek out someone or something in the world as a means of overcoming or at the very least understanding why or how it is they have ended up on this isolated road.
A random thought that came from the reading of page 25 (obvious logical fallacy but...) If God is Alone and God is perfect, Does being Alone lead to perfection?
Important and/or Memorable Quotes:
I see at last that none of us is properly to be judged for what happened in the past. (13)
'I have been looking through my papers tonight. Some have been converted to kitchen uses, some the child has destroyed. This form of censorship pleases me for it has the indifference of the natural world to the construction of art- an indifference I am beginning to share. (15)
'In the great quietness of these winter evenings there is one clock: the sea' (16)
'As for me I am either happy nor unhappy. I lie suspended like a hair or a feather in the cloudy mixtures of memory' (16)
'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 the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential-the imagination' (17)
I talk to her as I would myself if I were alone (17)
I am thinking back to the time when for the four of us the known world hardly existed. Days became simply the spaces between dreams, spaces between the shifting floors of time, of acting, of living out the topical... A tide of meaningless affairs nothing along the dead level of things, entering no climate, leading us nowhere, demanding of us nothing save the impossible-that we should be. (18)
Now tired men throw back the shutters of their balconies and step blinking into the pale hot light-etiolated flowers of afternoons spent in anguish, tossing upon ugly beds, bandaged by dreams (19)
'To a Frenchman the love here is interesting. They act before they reflect. When the time comes to doubt, suffer remorse, it is too hot, nobody has the energy. It lacks finesse, this animalism, but it suits me. I've worn out my heart and head with love' (21)
'Small talk has become a useful form of automatism which goes on long after one has lost the need to talk; if necessary I can even make love with relief, as one does not sleep very well here: but without passion, without attention' (22)
'You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature' (22)
'You talk as if there was a choice. We are not strong enough or evil enough to exercise choice. All this is part of an experiment arranged by something else, the city perhaps, or another part of ourselves. How do I know?' (27)
'He thought and suffered a good deal but he lacked the resolution to dar-the first requisite of a practitioner' (28)
'Your Greek is good. Doubtless you are a writer. I said Doubtless. Not to be known always wounds. There seems no point i pursuing all this' (31)
'After all she compromised the least part of me- my reputation (33)
There are forms of greatness, you know, which when not applied in art of religion make havoc of ordinary life. (33)
'His heart has withered in him and he has been left with the five senses, like pieces of broken wineglass. However a life of such striking monotony does not seem to depress him (34)
His laughter is the most natural and unfeigned of any I have ever heard. (35)
'Capodistria has the purely involuntary knack of turning everything into a woman, under his eyes chairs become painfully conscious of their bare legs. He impregnates things. (38)
'I did not know how to reply for all ideas seem equally good to me, the fact of their existence proves that someone is creating' (41)
We are the children of our landscape (41)
If she ever knew me at all she must later have discovered that for those of us who feel deeply and who are at all conscious of the inextricable tangle of human thought there is only one response to be made-ironic tenderness and silence (42)
'The mauve-lemon light of the fast-fading afternoon (46)
'I saw then what I should have seen long before: namely that our friendship had ripened to a point when we had already become in a way part-owners of each other (48)
'To imagine falling i love as a correspondence of minds, of thoughts, it is a simultaneous firing of two spirits engaged in the autonomous act of growing up. And the sensation is of something having noiselessly exploded inside each of them (49)
'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 preced the first look, kiss, or touch, preced 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' (50)
'diseases are not interested in those who want to die' (50)
'I am exhausted, your kindness is wasted' (53)
'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 kind dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean' (54)
'I hunt everywhere for a life that is worth living. Perhaps if I could die or go mad it would provide a focus for all the feelings I have which find no proper outlet' (68)
'He maintains for example that real people can only exist in the imagination of an artist strong enough to contain them and give them form. Life, the raw material, is only lived in potentia until the artist deploys it in his work. Would that I could do this service of love for poor Justine' (75)
I would set my own book free to dream (75)
Alexandrian girls are distinguished from women in other places only by terrifying honesty and world-weariness (76)
-'You live among my imaginary intimacies. I was a fool to tell you everything, to be so honest. Look at the way you question me now. Several days running the same questions. And at the slightest discrepancy you are on me. You know I never tell a story the same way twice. Does that mean I am lying? (82)
'Ah she said softly and sadly: You are crying. I wish I could. I have lost the knack' (86)
Only in this way, by knowing what I am doing, can I outgrow myself. It isn't easy to be me. I so much want to be responsible for myself. Please never doubt that (87)
-End Part One-
'I see now that he was one of those rare people who had found philosophy for himself and whose life was occupied in trying to live it. I think this is the unanalysed quality which gives his talk cutting-edge' 92
'We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd. ' 92
'He was really using himself up, his inner self, in living' 93
'I imagine, therefore I belong and am free' 93
'Of all of us he is the most happy in a way because he has no preconceived idea of what he wants in return for his love. And to love in such an unpremeditated way is something that most people have to re-learn after fifty. Children have it. So has he.' 95
'None of the great religions have done more than exclude, throw out a long range of prohibitions. But prohibitions create the desire they are intended to cure. We of this Cabal say: Indulge but refine. (100)
'He only laughs but somehow he helps me to dispel the hollowness I feel in everything I do.' (101)
'Passionate love even for a man's own wife is also adultery' (102)
'It is hard to fight with own's heart's desire; whatever it wishes to get, it purchases at the cost of the soul' (103)
'I realized then the truth about all love: that it is an absolute which takes all or forfeits all' (105)
'vast jungle of unreason' (109)
' allowed it to mature as all love should into a consuming and depersonalized friendship' (110)
'We use each other like axes to cut down the ones we really love' 112 (kafkaesque)
'All artists today are expected to cultivate a little fashionable unhappiness' (114)
'his loneliness threatened his reason' (114)
'And now comes the terrifying thought: perhaps there is no one left to see? Who, after all, is he?' (115)
'Shyness has laws: you can only give yourself, tragically, to those who least understand. For to understand one would be to admit pity for one's frailty. Hence the women he loves, the letters he write to the women he loves, stand as ciphers in his mind for the women he thinks he wants, or at any rate deserve-cher ami.' (115)
(What I most need to do is to record experience, not in the order which they took place-for that is history- but in the order in which they first became significant to me' (115)
'I feebly lingered, obstructed by the apologetic politeness I always feel with people I do not really like' (116)
'Baudelaire says that copulation is the lyric of the mov. In another century we shall lie with our tongues in each other's mouths, silent and passionless as sea-fruit' (117)
'These Are the low moments when the long flirtations with suicide begin afresh' (117)
'for years one has to put up with the feeling that people do not care, really care, about one, then one day with growing alarm, one realizes that it is God who does not care: and not merely that he does not care, he does not care one way or the other' (118)
'These are the sort of fragments which tease the waking mind on evenings like these, walking about in the wintry darkness' (118)
'To every one we turn a different face of the prism' (119)
'To have great beauty. to have enough money to construct an independent life; to have a skill-these are the factors which persuade the envious, the dispirited to regard her as undeservedly lucky. But why, ask her critics and observers, has she denied herself marriage?' (128)
'A bookcase whose crowded shelves indicate that she denies it nothing' (129)
'My solitude does not deprive me of anything, nor am I fitted to be other than I am. I want you to see how successful I am and not imagine me full of inner failings' (129)
'Love is horribly stable, and each of us is only allotted a certain portion of it, a ration. It is capable of appearing in an infinity of forms and attaching itself to an infinity of people. But it is limited in quantity' (130)
'A mania for self-justification is common both to those hose consciences are uneasy and to those who seek a philosophic rationale for their actions: but in either case it leads to strange forms of thinking. The idea is not spontaneous, but voulu. In the case of Justine this mania led to a perpetual flow of ideas, speculations on past and present actions, which pressed upon her mind with the weight of a massive current pressing upon the walls of a dam (132-33)
'If you think of yourself as a sleeping city for example...what? You can sit quiet and hear the process going on, going about their business, volition, desire, will, cognition, passion, conation. I mean like the million legs of a centipede carrying on with the body powerless todo anything about it. One gets exhausted trying to circumnavigate these huge fields of experience. We are never free, we writiers. I could explain it much more clearly if it was dawn. (139/40)
'No one thing can explain everything: though everything can illuminate something' (140)
'These fugitive memories explain nothing, illuminated nothing: yet they return again and again when I think of my friends as if the very circumstance of our habits had become impregnated with what he then felt, the parts we then acted. ' (142)
'Guilt alway hurries towards its complement, punishment: only there does its satisfaction lie. (147-48)
'The mentally empty phases lived on in the silence they invaded until the air seemed packed with common-places' (149)
'I reminded myself that she was not a pleasure-seeker, but a hunter of pain in search of herself- and me' 151
'It is not love that is blind but jealousy' (151)
'The problem was how to dispose of me- 'I do not mean in the flesh so much. For I'd become merely an image standing in his light.He saw me perhaps drying, perhaps going away. He did not know. the very uncertainty was exciting to the pitch of drunkenness' (152)
'had we mastered the virtues which it illustrated, have separated us forever- I mean in the selves which preyed upon each other's infatuated images' (158)
'What terrified him only was the sensation of utter loneliness-a reality which he would nvber, he realized, be able to communicate either to his friends or to the doctors who might be called in to renounce upon anomalies of behaviour which they would regard only as symptoms of disorder. (160)
'from deep inside the camera obscura of his thoughts' (165)
'it was amazing how quickly the human image was dissolving into the mythical image he had created of himself in his trilogy God Is a Humorist' 168
'I sat on the three-legged stool and placed my eye to the eye-piece, to allow the faintly trembling and vibrating image of the landscape to assemble for me' (169)
'how grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work' (172)
'morality is nothing if it is merely a form of good behaviour' (177)
'With a column on the march memory become an industry, manufacturing dreams which common ills untie in a community of ideas based on privation.
'Minds dismemembered by their sexual part...never find peace until old age and failing powers persuade them that silence and quietness are not hostile' (180)
'What could one believe when reality mocked the imagination by its performance?' (181)
'This is no journey for feet, however. Look into yourself, withdraw into yourself and look. (181)
'When there is something to hide one becomes an actor. It forces all the people round one to act as well' (184)
'I wondered as I had always wondered, where time was leading us' 185
'If it is true you are only taking advantage of an illness in loving her (192)
'His sense were beginning to accuse reality itself of inconsistency' 194
'Are people...continuously themselves, or simply over and over again so fast that they give the illusion of continuous features-the temporal flicker of old silent film?) I lacked a belief in the true uthenticity of people in order to successfully portray them. ' 196
I did not depend on her; and the desire to possess can, if starved, render one absolutely possessed in the spirit oneself' 197
'My value was not in anything I achiever or anything I owned. Justine loved me because I resented to her something which was indestructible- a person already formed who could not be broken' 198
'I have become solitude' 201
I found that as well as displeasing another I also displeased myself; now, alone, I have only myself to displease' 201
'They has there for a long time enjoying the firelight and the sensation of sharing something-their common hopelessness' 202
'She was a walking abstract of the writers and thinkers whom she had loved or admired-but what clever woman is more? 203
'Loving is so much truer when sympathy and not desire makes the match; for it leaves no wounds. (204)
'every woman is a new life, compact and self-contained and sui generis' 206
'sexual jealousy is the most curious of animals and can take up lodgement anywhere, even in memory. (208)
'In marriage they legitimised despair.... Every kiss is the conquest of repulsion' 212
'A thousand conventional commonplaces, a thousand conventional questions spring to my mind, but for a long time I can say nothing' 217
'It appears that death is a relative question. We had only been prepared to accept a certain share of it when when we entered the dark lake with our weapons' 218
'The words that lovers use at such times are charged with distorting emotions. Only their silences have the cruel precision which aligns them to truth. we were silent, holding hands. She embraced me... (226)
'To the student of love these separations are a school, bitter yet necessary to one's growth. They help to strip oneself mentally of everything save the hunger for more life' 229
'How small can a world become? Throughout this period I read nothing, thought nothing, was nothing' 233
'Lovers are never equally matched-do you think? One always overshadows the other and stunts his or her growth so that the overshadowed one must always be tormented by a desire to escape, to be free to grow. Surely this is the only tragic thing about love?' 243
----thoughts connected to the absorption of dreams. The concept that journeys are not had by feet, but from being withdrawn into the self.
Durrell's [b:Justine|13037|Justine (The Alexandria Quartet #1)|Lawrence Durrell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1428544115l/13037._SY75_.jpg|45387] is a beautiful, lyrical and heartbreaking tale of loss and lust.
In it, he drops his readers into a compelling love quadrangle set in an Alexandria populated by artists, swindlers and philosophers.
It is a novel about the complexities of identity and friendship, of compulsion and passion and most importantly, the understandable and yet inexplicable actions of those who are unable to express love.
Durrell's characters are characterised by their flaws and their ability to accept themselves as such as well as each other. Though each is arguably broken in their own way, each one of his characters seek out someone or something in the world as a means of overcoming or at the very least understanding why or how it is they have ended up on this isolated road.
A random thought that came from the reading of page 25 (obvious logical fallacy but...) If God is Alone and God is perfect, Does being Alone lead to perfection?
Important and/or Memorable Quotes:
I see at last that none of us is properly to be judged for what happened in the past. (13)
'I have been looking through my papers tonight. Some have been converted to kitchen uses, some the child has destroyed. This form of censorship pleases me for it has the indifference of the natural world to the construction of art- an indifference I am beginning to share. (15)
'In the great quietness of these winter evenings there is one clock: the sea' (16)
'As for me I am either happy nor unhappy. I lie suspended like a hair or a feather in the cloudy mixtures of memory' (16)
'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 the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential-the imagination' (17)
I talk to her as I would myself if I were alone (17)
I am thinking back to the time when for the four of us the known world hardly existed. Days became simply the spaces between dreams, spaces between the shifting floors of time, of acting, of living out the topical... A tide of meaningless affairs nothing along the dead level of things, entering no climate, leading us nowhere, demanding of us nothing save the impossible-that we should be. (18)
Now tired men throw back the shutters of their balconies and step blinking into the pale hot light-etiolated flowers of afternoons spent in anguish, tossing upon ugly beds, bandaged by dreams (19)
'To a Frenchman the love here is interesting. They act before they reflect. When the time comes to doubt, suffer remorse, it is too hot, nobody has the energy. It lacks finesse, this animalism, but it suits me. I've worn out my heart and head with love' (21)
'Small talk has become a useful form of automatism which goes on long after one has lost the need to talk; if necessary I can even make love with relief, as one does not sleep very well here: but without passion, without attention' (22)
'You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature' (22)
'You talk as if there was a choice. We are not strong enough or evil enough to exercise choice. All this is part of an experiment arranged by something else, the city perhaps, or another part of ourselves. How do I know?' (27)
'He thought and suffered a good deal but he lacked the resolution to dar-the first requisite of a practitioner' (28)
'Your Greek is good. Doubtless you are a writer. I said Doubtless. Not to be known always wounds. There seems no point i pursuing all this' (31)
'After all she compromised the least part of me- my reputation (33)
There are forms of greatness, you know, which when not applied in art of religion make havoc of ordinary life. (33)
'His heart has withered in him and he has been left with the five senses, like pieces of broken wineglass. However a life of such striking monotony does not seem to depress him (34)
His laughter is the most natural and unfeigned of any I have ever heard. (35)
'Capodistria has the purely involuntary knack of turning everything into a woman, under his eyes chairs become painfully conscious of their bare legs. He impregnates things. (38)
'I did not know how to reply for all ideas seem equally good to me, the fact of their existence proves that someone is creating' (41)
We are the children of our landscape (41)
If she ever knew me at all she must later have discovered that for those of us who feel deeply and who are at all conscious of the inextricable tangle of human thought there is only one response to be made-ironic tenderness and silence (42)
'The mauve-lemon light of the fast-fading afternoon (46)
'I saw then what I should have seen long before: namely that our friendship had ripened to a point when we had already become in a way part-owners of each other (48)
'To imagine falling i love as a correspondence of minds, of thoughts, it is a simultaneous firing of two spirits engaged in the autonomous act of growing up. And the sensation is of something having noiselessly exploded inside each of them (49)
'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 preced the first look, kiss, or touch, preced 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' (50)
'diseases are not interested in those who want to die' (50)
'I am exhausted, your kindness is wasted' (53)
'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 kind dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean' (54)
'I hunt everywhere for a life that is worth living. Perhaps if I could die or go mad it would provide a focus for all the feelings I have which find no proper outlet' (68)
'He maintains for example that real people can only exist in the imagination of an artist strong enough to contain them and give them form. Life, the raw material, is only lived in potentia until the artist deploys it in his work. Would that I could do this service of love for poor Justine' (75)
I would set my own book free to dream (75)
Alexandrian girls are distinguished from women in other places only by terrifying honesty and world-weariness (76)
-'You live among my imaginary intimacies. I was a fool to tell you everything, to be so honest. Look at the way you question me now. Several days running the same questions. And at the slightest discrepancy you are on me. You know I never tell a story the same way twice. Does that mean I am lying? (82)
'Ah she said softly and sadly: You are crying. I wish I could. I have lost the knack' (86)
Only in this way, by knowing what I am doing, can I outgrow myself. It isn't easy to be me. I so much want to be responsible for myself. Please never doubt that (87)
-End Part One-
'I see now that he was one of those rare people who had found philosophy for himself and whose life was occupied in trying to live it. I think this is the unanalysed quality which gives his talk cutting-edge' 92
'We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd. ' 92
'He was really using himself up, his inner self, in living' 93
'I imagine, therefore I belong and am free' 93
'Of all of us he is the most happy in a way because he has no preconceived idea of what he wants in return for his love. And to love in such an unpremeditated way is something that most people have to re-learn after fifty. Children have it. So has he.' 95
'None of the great religions have done more than exclude, throw out a long range of prohibitions. But prohibitions create the desire they are intended to cure. We of this Cabal say: Indulge but refine. (100)
'He only laughs but somehow he helps me to dispel the hollowness I feel in everything I do.' (101)
'Passionate love even for a man's own wife is also adultery' (102)
'It is hard to fight with own's heart's desire; whatever it wishes to get, it purchases at the cost of the soul' (103)
'I realized then the truth about all love: that it is an absolute which takes all or forfeits all' (105)
'vast jungle of unreason' (109)
' allowed it to mature as all love should into a consuming and depersonalized friendship' (110)
'We use each other like axes to cut down the ones we really love' 112 (kafkaesque)
'All artists today are expected to cultivate a little fashionable unhappiness' (114)
'his loneliness threatened his reason' (114)
'And now comes the terrifying thought: perhaps there is no one left to see? Who, after all, is he?' (115)
'Shyness has laws: you can only give yourself, tragically, to those who least understand. For to understand one would be to admit pity for one's frailty. Hence the women he loves, the letters he write to the women he loves, stand as ciphers in his mind for the women he thinks he wants, or at any rate deserve-cher ami.' (115)
(What I most need to do is to record experience, not in the order which they took place-for that is history- but in the order in which they first became significant to me' (115)
'I feebly lingered, obstructed by the apologetic politeness I always feel with people I do not really like' (116)
'Baudelaire says that copulation is the lyric of the mov. In another century we shall lie with our tongues in each other's mouths, silent and passionless as sea-fruit' (117)
'These Are the low moments when the long flirtations with suicide begin afresh' (117)
'for years one has to put up with the feeling that people do not care, really care, about one, then one day with growing alarm, one realizes that it is God who does not care: and not merely that he does not care, he does not care one way or the other' (118)
'These are the sort of fragments which tease the waking mind on evenings like these, walking about in the wintry darkness' (118)
'To every one we turn a different face of the prism' (119)
'To have great beauty. to have enough money to construct an independent life; to have a skill-these are the factors which persuade the envious, the dispirited to regard her as undeservedly lucky. But why, ask her critics and observers, has she denied herself marriage?' (128)
'A bookcase whose crowded shelves indicate that she denies it nothing' (129)
'My solitude does not deprive me of anything, nor am I fitted to be other than I am. I want you to see how successful I am and not imagine me full of inner failings' (129)
'Love is horribly stable, and each of us is only allotted a certain portion of it, a ration. It is capable of appearing in an infinity of forms and attaching itself to an infinity of people. But it is limited in quantity' (130)
'A mania for self-justification is common both to those hose consciences are uneasy and to those who seek a philosophic rationale for their actions: but in either case it leads to strange forms of thinking. The idea is not spontaneous, but voulu. In the case of Justine this mania led to a perpetual flow of ideas, speculations on past and present actions, which pressed upon her mind with the weight of a massive current pressing upon the walls of a dam (132-33)
'If you think of yourself as a sleeping city for example...what? You can sit quiet and hear the process going on, going about their business, volition, desire, will, cognition, passion, conation. I mean like the million legs of a centipede carrying on with the body powerless todo anything about it. One gets exhausted trying to circumnavigate these huge fields of experience. We are never free, we writiers. I could explain it much more clearly if it was dawn. (139/40)
'No one thing can explain everything: though everything can illuminate something' (140)
'These fugitive memories explain nothing, illuminated nothing: yet they return again and again when I think of my friends as if the very circumstance of our habits had become impregnated with what he then felt, the parts we then acted. ' (142)
'Guilt alway hurries towards its complement, punishment: only there does its satisfaction lie. (147-48)
'The mentally empty phases lived on in the silence they invaded until the air seemed packed with common-places' (149)
'I reminded myself that she was not a pleasure-seeker, but a hunter of pain in search of herself- and me' 151
'It is not love that is blind but jealousy' (151)
'The problem was how to dispose of me- 'I do not mean in the flesh so much. For I'd become merely an image standing in his light.He saw me perhaps drying, perhaps going away. He did not know. the very uncertainty was exciting to the pitch of drunkenness' (152)
'had we mastered the virtues which it illustrated, have separated us forever- I mean in the selves which preyed upon each other's infatuated images' (158)
'What terrified him only was the sensation of utter loneliness-a reality which he would nvber, he realized, be able to communicate either to his friends or to the doctors who might be called in to renounce upon anomalies of behaviour which they would regard only as symptoms of disorder. (160)
'from deep inside the camera obscura of his thoughts' (165)
'it was amazing how quickly the human image was dissolving into the mythical image he had created of himself in his trilogy God Is a Humorist' 168
'I sat on the three-legged stool and placed my eye to the eye-piece, to allow the faintly trembling and vibrating image of the landscape to assemble for me' (169)
'how grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work' (172)
'morality is nothing if it is merely a form of good behaviour' (177)
'With a column on the march memory become an industry, manufacturing dreams which common ills untie in a community of ideas based on privation.
'Minds dismemembered by their sexual part...never find peace until old age and failing powers persuade them that silence and quietness are not hostile' (180)
'What could one believe when reality mocked the imagination by its performance?' (181)
'This is no journey for feet, however. Look into yourself, withdraw into yourself and look. (181)
'When there is something to hide one becomes an actor. It forces all the people round one to act as well' (184)
'I wondered as I had always wondered, where time was leading us' 185
'If it is true you are only taking advantage of an illness in loving her (192)
'His sense were beginning to accuse reality itself of inconsistency' 194
'Are people...continuously themselves, or simply over and over again so fast that they give the illusion of continuous features-the temporal flicker of old silent film?) I lacked a belief in the true uthenticity of people in order to successfully portray them. ' 196
I did not depend on her; and the desire to possess can, if starved, render one absolutely possessed in the spirit oneself' 197
'My value was not in anything I achiever or anything I owned. Justine loved me because I resented to her something which was indestructible- a person already formed who could not be broken' 198
'I have become solitude' 201
I found that as well as displeasing another I also displeased myself; now, alone, I have only myself to displease' 201
'They has there for a long time enjoying the firelight and the sensation of sharing something-their common hopelessness' 202
'She was a walking abstract of the writers and thinkers whom she had loved or admired-but what clever woman is more? 203
'Loving is so much truer when sympathy and not desire makes the match; for it leaves no wounds. (204)
'every woman is a new life, compact and self-contained and sui generis' 206
'sexual jealousy is the most curious of animals and can take up lodgement anywhere, even in memory. (208)
'In marriage they legitimised despair.... Every kiss is the conquest of repulsion' 212
'A thousand conventional commonplaces, a thousand conventional questions spring to my mind, but for a long time I can say nothing' 217
'It appears that death is a relative question. We had only been prepared to accept a certain share of it when when we entered the dark lake with our weapons' 218
'The words that lovers use at such times are charged with distorting emotions. Only their silences have the cruel precision which aligns them to truth. we were silent, holding hands. She embraced me... (226)
'To the student of love these separations are a school, bitter yet necessary to one's growth. They help to strip oneself mentally of everything save the hunger for more life' 229
'How small can a world become? Throughout this period I read nothing, thought nothing, was nothing' 233
'Lovers are never equally matched-do you think? One always overshadows the other and stunts his or her growth so that the overshadowed one must always be tormented by a desire to escape, to be free to grow. Surely this is the only tragic thing about love?' 243
----thoughts connected to the absorption of dreams. The concept that journeys are not had by feet, but from being withdrawn into the self.
stevesaroff's review against another edition
5.0
It was during my time of poverty and poetry when I read Justine, the first book in The Alexandria Quartet. I was 19 years old and was living outside in Missoula, Montana. I slept mostly way up on Mount Sentinel. My small tent was hidden in the trees near the mountain's top, and each night when the library on campus closed, I would hike up to my tent. And it was a cold winter. Weeks of sub zero temperatures. Around that time I had also become friends with the poet Richard Hugo, and he had suggested I read Justine. So each night, by candle light, I would slowly read a few pages before falling asleep. Slowly because I had trouble reading then - Dyslexia - and because Durrell's poetry in his prose demanded slowness. Now transition to the book itself: it's in the 1940s in Alexandria. The narrator has suffered a conflicted love triangle, or, depending on how it is looked at, is suffering from being jilted, and to find the cure of the pain he writes. And Justine is the woman he was in love with. And this first book of the Quartet looks at the relationship head on, while each of the next 3 books look at the same settings and characters from a different perspective. Probably the best book I had ever read, and still one of the best. And, back when I was reading Justine, it was better than my hunger, my cold, the hard ground, and far better than the loneliness of homelessness. The Alexandria Quartet -- and 'Justine,' this first book, more so then the other three -- was the food that my soul so desperately needed. This book offered an explanation of why our hearts can be broken. We reach for words for the music and the story, and discover we are human by what we sometimes find: each other.