"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"
About this Quote
Durrell turns what sounds like consolation into a dare: art is not an escape hatch from life’s humiliations but a way of meeting them on higher ground. The key phrase is “joyous compromise,” which refuses the usual romantic posturing that the artist is either heroically unbroken or tragically destroyed. Compromise suggests bargain, negotiation, even surrender - but “joyous” reframes that surrender as agency. Daily life wounds you; art lets you decide what the wound will mean.
His real target is the fantasy of evasion. “Ordinary people” try to dodge destiny, Durrell claims, by numbing themselves with routine or conformity. Artists, in his telling, don’t get that luxury. They “fulfil” destiny by metabolizing defeat into form. The subtext is quietly elitist, yes, but it’s also a psychological observation: the artist’s difference isn’t moral superiority; it’s an inability to leave experience unprocessed. Pain has to be converted into something that holds.
Context matters. Durrell’s work, especially The Alexandria Quartet, is obsessed with how perception reshapes reality - the same events, retold, become different lives. That fits this quote’s final twist: destiny’s “true potential” isn’t fate-as-script but fate-as-raw material. Imagination is framed not as decoration but as the part of human consciousness that completes the world. Where life defeats you in the literal, art lets you answer in the possible.
His real target is the fantasy of evasion. “Ordinary people” try to dodge destiny, Durrell claims, by numbing themselves with routine or conformity. Artists, in his telling, don’t get that luxury. They “fulfil” destiny by metabolizing defeat into form. The subtext is quietly elitist, yes, but it’s also a psychological observation: the artist’s difference isn’t moral superiority; it’s an inability to leave experience unprocessed. Pain has to be converted into something that holds.
Context matters. Durrell’s work, especially The Alexandria Quartet, is obsessed with how perception reshapes reality - the same events, retold, become different lives. That fits this quote’s final twist: destiny’s “true potential” isn’t fate-as-script but fate-as-raw material. Imagination is framed not as decoration but as the part of human consciousness that completes the world. Where life defeats you in the literal, art lets you answer in the possible.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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