Parenting & Family Quote by Lawrence Durrell

Durrell’s line flatters your sense of agency only to take it away. “Children” suggests innocence and dependence, not mastery; the landscape isn’t a backdrop you stride across, it’s a parent you’re raised by. The verb “dictates” is deliberately authoritarian, smuggling in a hard claim under lyrical cover: place doesn’t merely influence mood or aesthetics, it scripts conduct and even the categories of thought. Durrell is pushing against the modern fantasy of the portable self, the idea that you can move anywhere and remain essentially unchanged.

The subtext is shrewdly conditional. He adds, “in the measure to which we are responsive to it,” a little escape hatch that also functions as a moral dare. If you’re numb to your surroundings, you can pretend you’re free. If you’re perceptive - the artist’s stance - you’re more deeply determined. Sensitivity becomes both a virtue and a vulnerability. It’s a cosmopolitan’s paradox: the more attentive you are, the more you’re shaped.

Context matters: Durrell wrote out of a Mediterranean imagination where geography is not abstract “space” but weather, light, scarcity, borders, and history stacked in stone. Think of islands, ports, and contested coastlines: environments that force certain economies (trade, smuggling, tourism), certain social rhythms (siesta time, nighttime streets), certain politics (who controls the harbor controls the town). He’s also writing against a purely psychological or interior account of character. Landscape here is a quiet determinism, but not a crude one: not destiny as fate, rather destiny as daily pressure - heat, terrain, distance - turning into habit, habit into worldview.