Life & Wisdom Quote by Lawrence Durrell

Durrell’s line is a writer’s knife twist: the moment you put “truth” into sentences, it stops being truth and starts being story. Not because truth is fake, but because telling is an act of selection. You frame, you edit, you choose a beginning that implies an ending. Even the cleanest confession smuggles in a narrator.

The intent feels both defensive and seductive. Defensive, because it preemptively excuses inconsistency: if truth evaporates when spoken, then contradictions aren’t moral failures; they’re proof of how language works. Seductive, because it flatters the private self as the only reliable archive. The reader is invited into complicity: you, too, know that the most accurate account of your life is the one you never quite manage to give.

Subtextually, Durrell is also talking about power. To “tell” is to impose order, and order is never neutral. The second an experience becomes communicable, it becomes shareable, arguable, taxable, punishable, commodified. Truth “disappears” not into nothingness but into competing versions. The spoken truth enters the social world where it can be misunderstood, weaponized, or politely rewritten.

Context matters: Durrell’s fiction is saturated with shifting perspectives and erotic-political atmospheres where identity is always being performed. “Truth disappears” reads like a manifesto for the modern novel, especially his: reality is plural, and narration is a kind of distortion you can’t opt out of. The wit is in the paradox. We chase truth by telling it, and in the chase we scare it off.