Top 100 Marguerite Duras Quotes
#1. Even so you have managed to live that love in the only way possible for you. Losing it before it happened.
Marguerite Duras
#2. Drinking isn't necessarily the same as wanting to die. But you can't drink without thinking you're killing yourself.
Marguerite Duras
#3. Stormy skies, says Ernesto. He grieved for them. Summer rain. Childhood.
Marguerite Duras
#4. I feel a sadness I expected and which comes only from myself. I say I've always been sad. That I can see the same sadness in photos of myself when I was small. That today, recognizing it as the sadness I've always had, I could almost call it by my own name, it's so like me.
Marguerite Duras
#5. Some people are like that - closed - they can't learn from anyone. Us, for example, we can't learn anything, neither I from you nor you from me, nor from anyone, nor from anything, nor from what happens.
Marguerite Duras
#6. In homosexual love the passion is homosexuality itself. What a homosexual loves, as if it were his lover, his country, his art, his land, is homosexuality.
Marguerite Duras
#7. For that's what a woman, a mother wants - to teach her children to take an interest in life. She knows it's safer for them to be interested in other people's happiness than to believe in their own.
Marguerite Duras
#9. What stops you killing yourself when you're intoxicated out of your mind is the thought that once you're dead you won't be able to drink any more.
Marguerite Duras
#10. In heterosexual love there's no solution. Man and woman are irreconcilable, and it's the doomed attempt to do the impossible, repeated in each new affair, that lends heterosexual love its grandeur.
Marguerite Duras
#12. I want to write. I've already told my mother: That's what I want to do-write. No answer the first time. Then she asks, Write what? I say, Books, novels. [ ... ] She's against it, it's not worthy, it's not real work, it's nonsense. Later she said, A childish idea.
Marguerite Duras
#14. The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken.
Marguerite Duras
#17. I know it's not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction of costliness of their finery. I know the problem lies elsewhere. I don't know where. I only know it isn't where women think.
Marguerite Duras
#18. Heterosexuality is dangerous. It tempts you to aim at a perfect duality of desire.
Marguerite Duras
#19. The thing that's between us is fascination, and the fascination resides in our being alike. Whether you're a man or a woman, the fascination resides in finding out that we're alike.
Marguerite Duras
#20. It's not that you have to achieve anything, it's that you have to get away from where you are.
Marguerite Duras
#21. In a certain state of mind, all trace of feeling is banished. Whenever I remain silent in a certain way, I don't love you, have you noticed that?
Marguerite Duras
#22. As long as nothing happens between them, the memory is cursed with what hasn't happened.
Marguerite Duras
#23. You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they're simply unbearable.
Marguerite Duras
#26. Don't be afraid anymore. Not of anyone. Not of anything. Nothing. Ever again. Listen to me: not ever again.
Marguerite Duras
#27. That she had so completely recovered her sanity was a source of sadness to her. One should never be cured of one's passion.
Marguerite Duras
#29. She can remember everyone admiring a rare kind of evening they spoke of as something they ought to save from oblivion to describe to their children later. And that for her part she would have had it hidden, had that late summer evening buried and burned to ashes.
Marguerite Duras
#30. Suddenly, all at once, she knows, knows that he doesn't understand her, that he never will, that he lacks the power to understand such perverseness. And that he can never move fast enough to catch her.
Marguerite Duras
#31. You alone became the outer surface of my life, the side I never see, and you will be that, the unknown part of me, until I die.
Marguerite Duras
#32. Fidelity, enforced and unto death, is the price you pay for the kind of love you never want to give up, for someone you want to hold forever, tighter and tighter, whether he's close or far away, someone who becomes dearer to you the more you've sacrificed for his sake.
Marguerite Duras
#35. Sometimes we have to avoid thinking about the problems life presents. Otherwise we'd suffocate. - Hiroshima Mon Amour, Marguerite Duras
Marguerite Duras
#36. You think of outside your room, of the streets of the town, the lonely little squares over by the station, of those winter Saturdays all alike.
Marguerite Duras
#37. A prolonged silence ensues. The reason for the silence is our growing interest one for the other. No one is aware of it, no one yet; no one? am I quite sure?
Marguerite Duras
#38. Men like women who write, even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country.
Marguerite Duras
#39. She says people ought to learn to live like them, with the body abandoned in a wilderness, and in the mind the memory of a single kiss, a single word, a single look to stand for a whole love.
Marguerite Duras
#40. It's only women who are not really quite women at all, frivolous women who have no idea, who neglect repairs.
Marguerite Duras
#41. I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.
Marguerite Duras
#42. I am dead. I have no desire for you. My body no longer wants the one who doesn't love.
Marguerite Duras
#43. Alcohol doesn't console, it doesn't fill up anyone's psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God. It doesn't comfort man. On the contrary, it encourages him in his folly, it transports him to the supreme regions where he is master of his own destiny.
Marguerite Duras
#44. Nowhere is one more alone than in Paris ... and yet surrounded by crowds. Nowhere is one more likely to incur greater ridicule. And no visit is more essential.
Marguerite Duras
#45. Yes, the heat lacerated the heart. And alone she resisted it, entire, virgin, the envy of the sea.
Marguerite Duras
#46. You didn't have to attract desire. Either it was in the woman who aroused it or it didn't exist. Either it was there at first glance or else it had never been.
Marguerite Duras
#47. Finally he hears something: he thinks it is the ebb and flow of the sea, the water crashing back into the abyss of salt.
Marguerite Duras
#48. People come to Paris, to the capital, to give their lives a sense of belonging, of an almost mythical participation in society.
Marguerite Duras
#49. In love there are no vacations. No such thing. Love has to be lived fully with its boredom and all that.
Marguerite Duras
#50. Madness is like intelligence, you know. You can't explain it. Just like intelligence. It comes on you, it fills you, and then you understand it. But when it goes away you can't understand it at all any longer.
Marguerite Duras
#51. When the past is recaptured by the imagination, breath is put back into life.
Marguerite Duras
#52. I had the face of pleasure, and yet I had no knowledge of pleasure. There was no mistaking that face.
Marguerite Duras
#53. I've never written, though I thought I wrote, never loved, though I thought I loved, never done anything but wait outside the closed door.
Marguerite Duras
#55. Frigidity is desire imagined by a woman who doesnt desire the man offering himself to her. Its the desire of a woman for a man who hasnt yet come to her, whom she doesnt yet know. Shes faithful to this stranger even before she belongs to him. Frigidity is the non-desire for whatever is not him.
Marguerite Duras
#56. He says he's lonely, horribly lonely because of this love he feels for her. She says she's lonely too. She doesn't say why.
Marguerite Duras
#57. What could Maria call the time that opened ahead of her? The certainty of her hope? This rejuvenated air she was breathing? This incandescence, this bursting of a love at last without object?
Marguerite Duras
#58. Perhaps someone will have seen mine, the one I'm waiting for, just as I saw him, in a ditch when his hands were making their last appeal and his eyes no longer could see. Someone who will never know what that man was to me; someone whose name I'll never know.
Marguerite Duras
#59. I've forgotten the words with which to tell you. I knew them once, but I've forgotten them, and now I'm talking to you without them.
Marguerite Duras
#60. Alcohol is barren. The words a man speaks in the night of drunkenness fade like the darkness itself at the coming of day.
Marguerite Duras
#61. When it's in a book I don't think it'll hurt any more ... exist any more. One of the things writing does is wipe things out. Replace them.
Marguerite Duras
#63. Because he doesn't know he carries within him a supreme elegance, I say it for him.
Marguerite Duras
#64. Their voices reach out into the empty yard, plunge deep into the hills, go right through the heart.
Marguerite Duras
#65. I seldom read on beaches or in gardens. You can't read by two lights at once, the light of day and the light of the book. You should read by electric light, the room in shadow, and only the page lit up.
Marguerite Duras
#67. One day,I was already old, a man came up to me in the street.
Marguerite Duras
#68. All that remains of that minute is time in all its purity, bone-white time.
Marguerite Duras
#69. I don't have general views about anything, except social injustice.
Marguerite Duras
#70. Paradoxically, the freedom of Paris is associated with a persistent belief that nothing ever changes. Paris, they say, is the city that changes least. After an absence of twenty or thirty years, one still recognizes it.
(Tourists in Paris)
Marguerite Duras
#71. I often think of the image only I can see now, and of which I've never spoken. It's always there, in the same silence, amazing. It's the only image of myself I like, the only one in which I recognize myself, in which I delight
Marguerite Duras
#72. I acquired that drinker's face before I drank. Drink only confirmed it. The space for it existed in me.
Marguerite Duras
#73. He says, You only came because I'm rich. I say that's how I desire him, with his money, that when I first saw him he was already in his car, in his money, so I can't say what I'd have done if he'd been different.
Marguerite Duras
#74. When you wept it was just over yourself and not because of the marvelous impossibility of reaching her through the difference that separates you.
Marguerite Duras
#75. There are many women who write as they think they should write - to imitate men and make a place for themselves in literature.
Marguerite Duras
#76. I suddenly remember something I've been told about fear. That amid a hail of machine gun fire you notice the existence of your skin.
Marguerite Duras
#77. In a thousand years time this day will have existed for a thousand years to the day. And the ignorance of the whole world about what they've said today will have a date too.
Marguerite Duras
#78. We tell each other things that have no relation to the afternoon's events or the coming night but that relate to God, to his absence that is so present, like the breasts of the young girl, so young before the immensity of what is to come.
Marguerite Duras
#79. I have never waited for anything the way I've waited for today, when nothing will happen.
Marguerite Duras
#80. When a woman drinks it's as if an animal were drinking, or a child. Alcoholism is scandalous in a woman, and a female alcoholic is rare, a serious matter. It's a slur on the divine in our nature.
Marguerite Duras
#81. You ask: Why is the malady of death fatal? She answers: Because whoever has it doesn't know he's a carrier, of death. And also because he's like to die without any life to die to, and without evn knowing that's what he's doing.
Marguerite Duras
#82. We're in the vanguard of a nameless battle, a battle without arms or bloodshed or glory: we're in the vanguard of waiting.
Marguerite Duras
#83. You tell yourself it would be best for her to die. You tell yourself that if now, at this hour of the night, she died, it would be easier. For you, you probably mean, but you don't finish the sentence.
Marguerite Duras
#84. Before they're plumbers or writers or taxi drivers or unemployed or journalists, before everything else, men are men. Whether heterosexual or homosexual. The only difference is that some of them remind you of it as soon as you meet them, and others wait for a little while.
Marguerite Duras
#85. What she said was always strange. It had happened long ago. It seemed insignificant. And yet it was something you remembered forever. The words as well as the story. The voice as much as the words.
Marguerite Duras
#87. War is a generality, so are the inevitabilities of war, including death.
Marguerite Duras
#88. The woman is the home. That's where she used to be, and that's where she still is. You might ask me, What if a man tries to be part of the home
will the woman let him? I answer yes. Because the he becomes one of the children.
Marguerite Duras
#89. The house a woman creates is a Utopia. She can't help it - can't help trying to interest her nearest and dearest not in happiness itself but in the search for it.
Marguerite Duras
#91. No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book, or painting can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation.
Marguerite Duras
#92. The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write.
Marguerite Duras
#93. Writing was the only thing that populated my life and made it magic.
Marguerite Duras
#94. To love one child and to love all children, whether living or dead -somewhere these two loves come together. To love a no-good but humble punk and to love an honest man who believes himself to be an honest man -somewhere these, too, come together.
Marguerite Duras
#95. Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable.
Marguerite Duras
#96. Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.
Marguerite Duras
#97. It's afterwards you realize that the feeling of happiness you had with a man didn't necessarily prove that you loved him.
Marguerite Duras
#98. What she tells the Japanese is this lost opportunity which has made her what she is.
The story she tells of this lost opportunity literally transports her outside herself and carries her toward this new man.
To give oneself, body and soul, that's it.
Marguerite Duras
#100. A house means a family house, a place specially meant for putting children and men in so as to restrict their waywardness and distract them from the longing for adventure and escape they've had since time began.
Marguerite Duras
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