Love Quote by Lawrence Durrell

A romantic line with a quiet trapdoor: Durrell makes music sound less like an art form than a condition of the body. By calling it "only love", he demotes the grand machinery of composition and technique, nudging us toward something more primal and embarrassing - the urge to reach another person and failing, at first, to speak. Music becomes the interim language for intimacy, the thing you use when ordinary sentences can’t carry the load.

The phrasing matters. "Looking" turns love into a restless agent, not a settled feeling; it prowls for expression, tests doors, tries handles. And "words" are framed as the destination rather than the raw material. That flips the usual hierarchy. We tend to think lyrics elevate music, or that words domesticate emotion into meaning. Durrell suggests the opposite: sound is what happens when love is still pre-verbal, when it hasn’t yet been disciplined into grammar, argument, or self-protective irony. Music is the draft; words are the edit.

Durrell, a novelist of sensual surfaces and complicated attachments (The Alexandria Quartet lives on erotic misreadings and emotional translation errors), knew how desire reshapes reality and how language both reveals and betrays us. In that context, the line reads less like a greeting-card truism and more like a theory of communication: love is the motive force, art is the workaround, and "words" are what we reach for when we’re ready to risk being understood - or rejected.