There, Being

     "I know. I know that I shall never again meet anything or anybody who will inspire me with passion. You know, it's quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don't do it. I know I'll never jump again."
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, p. 194.

     "No, I don't want to talk about it. But here's a story if you like, a story that made a great impression on me when I was in school. There was a king who had lost a battle and was taken prisoner. He was there, off in a corner, in the victor's camp. He saw his son and daughter pass by in chains. He didn't weep, he didn't say anything. Then he saw one of his servants pass by, in chains too. Then he began to groan and tear out his hair. You can make up your own examples. You see: there are times when you mustn't cry — oe else you'll be unclean. But if you drop a log on your foot, you can do as you please, groan, cry, jump around on the other foot. It would be foolish to be stoical all the time: you'd wear yourself out for nothing."
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, pp. 199-200.

     When I reread The Black Book, .... In that book I drained the electric charge: The act of attacking oneself liberates the reader. He sees a reflection of himself. 'So,' he says to himself, 'I'm not mad after all; here's someone else who has experienced the same hidden, twisted, agonizing sensations.' But it's a path everyone has to go along. The words used by the creative person are not different from other men's.
....
     And also the scale! We describe giants and freaks in order to illustrate instincts and inclinations that are infinitely more attenuated in real life. But the monsters exist in every one of us.
— Lawrence Durrell: The Big Supposer, An Interview by Marc Alyn, Francine Barker (tr.), p. 46.

We shall be compelled to talk
                                  only
In puns so that our children
                          computers
                              should not understand
— Lawrence Durrell, Ibid., p. 146.

A lion, he was thrown to the Christians

Epitaph on the Tomb of the Vampire Poet
'Too much self-control betrays a lack of application'

Madness is the forgery of true experience

When Faust spoke the forbidden wish 'Verweile doch, du list so shon' (Moment, stay now! You are so beautiful), the Devil came and took his soul.

Poetry, like life itself, is far too serious not to be taken lightly.
— Lawrence Durrell, Ibid., pp. 149-150 passim.