Love Quote by Lawrence Durrell

Durrell flips a well-worn cliche with the neat cruelty of someone who knows how romance curdles. “Love is blind” is usually offered as a forgiving shrug: the heart has its reasons, we overlook flaws, we choose someone anyway. Durrell refuses that softness. Love, in his telling, is not the condition that makes us stupid; jealousy is. The line is a small act of moral accounting, assigning the real damage to the emotion that masquerades as devotion while behaving like surveillance.

The intent is corrective, almost clinical. Jealousy doesn’t merely intensify love; it distorts perception until every neutral detail becomes evidence and every absence becomes a plot. Blindness here isn’t ignorance, it’s tunnel vision: a compulsive narrowing of reality to whatever supports the fear of being replaced. Durrell’s phrasing makes jealousy the agent, not the symptom. That’s the subtextual sting: jealousy is less an unavoidable feeling than a choice to prioritize possession over understanding.

Context matters because Durrell’s work circles obsession, erotic power, and the politics of intimacy - especially in The Alexandria Quartet, where desire is rarely pure and almost never private. In that world, jealousy is an epistemology: a way characters “know” one another by interrogating, projecting, controlling. The wit is that jealousy claims to be hyper-attentive (“I notice everything”), while Durrell labels it blind. It sees constantly, and understands nothing.