Durrell has some wonderful exchanges with a philosopher-fisherman called Manoli during his two years living in Rhodes after the war.  I liked this idea of cultivating your own happiness like a pot of basil on the window sill. 

His happiness is his own work, cultivated like the tiny pot of basil in the window of his house, by patience and the bitter harmony of experience. 

Source: Lawrence Durrell, Reflections on a Marine Venus (London: Faber & Faber, 1960), p. 50

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