Александрийский квартет

I just don’t see what D. H. Lawrence has to offer a pasha with seventeen wives, though I believe I know which one of them is happiest….

‘ “You are tipsy” cried Liza again.
‘ “No. I am happy.” He said it seriously. “And happiness can’t be induced. You must wait and ambush it like a quail or a girl with tired wings. Between art and contrivance there is a gulf fixed!”

But he was not altogether a fool; he was learning the two most important lessons in life: to make love honestly and to reflect.

My objects in the novels? To interrogate human values through an honest representation of the human passions. A desirable end, perhaps a hopeless objective.

I have always believed in letting my reader sink or skim.

We must always defend Plato to Aristotle and vice versa because if they should lose touch with each other we should be lost. The dimorphism of the psyche produced them both.

We must always defend Plato to Aristotle and vice versa because if they should lose touch with each other we should be lost. The dimorphism of the psyche produced them both.

Science is the poetry of the intellect and poetry the science of the heart’s affections.

Not to force time, as the weak do, for that spells self-injury and dismay, but to harness its rhythms and put them to our own use.

At first ...we seek to supplement the emptiness of our individuality through love, and for a brief moment enjoy the illusion of completeness. But it is only an illusion. For
this strange creature, which we thought would join us to the body of the world, succeeds at last in separating us most thoroughly from it. Love joins and then divides. How else would we be growing?

‘To intercalate realities’ writes Balthazar ‘is the only way to be faithful to Time, for at every moment in Time the possibilities are endless in their multiplicity. Life consists in the act of choice. The perpetual reservations of judgement and the perpetual choosing.’

Can emotions be retrospective, retroactive?

In memory, I always see them like this, staring at each other with clasped hands, so near together, so far apart. The telephone is a modern symbol for communications which never take place.

And when night falls and the white city lights up the thousand candelabra of its parks and buildings, tunes in to the soft unearthly drum-music of Morocco or Caucasus, it looks like some great crystal liner asleep there, anchored to the horn of Africa — her diamond and fire-opal reflections twisting downwards like polished bars into the oily harbour among the battleships.

The city, inhabited by these memories of mine, moves not only backwards into our history, studded by the great names which mark every station of recorded time, but also back and forth in the living present, so to speak — among its contemporary faiths and races: the hundred little spheres which religion or lore creates and which cohere softly together like cells to form the great sprawling jellyfish which is Alexandria today.

A diary is the last place to go if you wish to seek the truth about a person.

‘There are only three things to be done with a woman’ said Clea once. ‘You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.’

...чем меньше он мог, тем большим становился занудой.

Что бы влюбленные ни сказали друг другу, все уже было сказано тысячу раз, тысячу тысяч. А поцелуи придумали для того, чтобы незначащие эти пустяки превращать в открытые раны.

Истина нагая и бесстыжая. Но мы-то всегда ее видим такой, какой она хочет казаться, не такой, какая она есть на самом деле. У каждого — своя интерпретация.