The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell

Clouds of dried blood walk the streets like prophecies the sand is settling into the sea like powder into the curls of a stale wig. The harsh sobbing air dries the membranes of throats and noses, and makes eyes raw with the configurations of conjunctivitis. And now unseen in the darkness of shuttered rooms the sand is invading everything, appearing as if by magic in clothes long locked away, books, pictures and teaspoons.In the locks of doors, beneath fingernails.

A few gusts of air and a thin sour rain are the forerunners of the darkness which blots out the light of the sky. 'That second spring the khamseen was worse than I have ever known it before or since.Before sunrise the skies of the desert turned brown as buckram, and then slowly darkened, swelling like a bruise and at last releasing the outlines of cloud, giant octaves of ochre which massed up from the Delta like the drift of ashes under a volcano.The city has shuttered itself tightly, as if against a gale. '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.'īalthazar: 'We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.'ĭarley's description of a great dust storm (khamseen) over Alexandria: At table I have seen a water-melon become conscious under his gaze so that it felt the seeds inside it stirring with life.'Īrabic proverb: 'The world is like a cucumber - today it's in your hand, tomorrow up your arse.'

The only response to life is 'ironic tenderness and silence'. 'Our friendship had ripened to a point where we had already become in a way part-owners of each other.' You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.' 'It is idle to go over all this in a medium as unstable as words.'Ĭlea: 'There are only three things to be done with a woman. 'A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants'. 'What I most need to do is to record experiences, not in the order in which they took place- for that is history - but in the order in which they first become significant for me.' It's tale of memory, of love, and the fallibility of humankind. The characters who spiral around this pair are all of them fascinating, multi-faceted, and hopelessly lost. Set in Alexandria and Greece throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the Quartet is the story of an impoverished British writer, Darley, and his love for the married, ambiguous Justine. Here instead, I offer a collection of quotes from the books, a 'commonplace book' if you will. To hell with reviews! Who needs 'em! I have written eloquently (if, in retrospect naively) about these books in the individual volumes.

The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell