Lines from The Alexandria Quartet, re-visited forty some odd years after first reading

   

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Apart from the wrinkled old peasant who comes from the village on her mule each day to clean the house, the child and I are quite alone.

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.

. . . days became simply the spaces between dreams . . .

The city unwrinkles like an old tortoise and peers about it.  For a moment it relinquishes the torn rags of the flesh, while from some hidden alley by the slaughter-house, above the moans and screams of the cattle, comes the nasal chipping of a Damascus love-song; shrill quartertones, like a sinus being ground to powder.

I suppose the secret of his success is his tremendous idleness, which almost approaches the supernatural.

"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."  I was experiencing a failure in all these domains of feeling.

Streets that run back from the docks with their supercargo of houses, breathing into each others' mouths, keeling over.
And then the street noises:  shriek and clang of the water-bearing Saidi, dashing his metal cups together as an advertisement, the unheeded shrieks which pierce the hubbub from time to time, as of some small delicately-organized animal being disembowelled.    

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