Life & Wisdom Quote by Lawrence Durrell

Durrell flips Descartes on his back and raids his pockets. “I think, therefore I am” is the tidy slogan of Western rational selfhood; “I imagine, therefore I belong and am free” swaps proof for permeability. Existence isn’t validated by logic but by the mind’s capacity to make worlds - and, crucially, to enter them. “Belong” is the tell: imagination here isn’t escapism, it’s social technology, a way of stitching the self into a landscape, a culture, a lover’s body, a city’s gossip. For a writer famous for turning place into mood and mood into philosophy, the line reads like a manifesto for art as citizenship.

The subtext is quietly defiant. Belonging is usually something granted by institutions - nation, class, family, language. Durrell suggests you can self-author that membership by reshaping perception. That’s also where “free” lands with a sharper edge: freedom isn’t the absence of constraints, it’s the ability to reframe them, to inhabit contradiction without being reduced by it. Imagination becomes a counterstate, a private jurisdiction.

Context matters: Durrell’s life was marked by displacement and cosmopolitan drift, and his fiction (especially the Alexandria books) treats identity as plural, provisional, made in the crosswinds of history and desire. In that light, the sentence isn’t airy idealism; it’s survival strategy. If the modern world makes you itinerant, compromised, misfiled, imagination offers a passport and a jailbreak - not from reality, but from the single story reality insists on telling about you.