L'amant Marguerite Duras Quotes

#1. a writer is a foreign country

Marguerite Duras

#2. 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

#3. Don't be afraid anymore. Not of anyone. Not of anything. Nothing. Ever again. Listen to me: not ever again.

Marguerite Duras

#4. The story of my life doesn't exist. Does not exist. There's never any center to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it's not true, there was no one.

Marguerite Duras

#5. She lavishes pain with generosity.

Marguerite Duras

#6. Banality is sometimes striking.

Marguerite Duras

#7. 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

#8. As long as nothing happens between them, the memory is cursed with what hasn't happened.

Marguerite Duras

#9. 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

#10. She had lived her early years as though she were waiting for something she might, but never did, become.

Marguerite Duras

#11. It's not that you have to achieve anything, it's that you have to get away from where you are.

Marguerite Duras

#12. 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

#13. Heterosexuality is dangerous. It tempts you to aim at a perfect duality of desire.

Marguerite Duras

#14. 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

#15. Life is only lived full-time by women with children.

Marguerite Duras

#16. Even so you have managed to live that love in the only way possible for you. Losing it before it happened.

Marguerite Duras

#17. 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

#18. I think about you. But I don't say it anymore.

Marguerite Duras

#19. 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

#20. And then, one day, my love, you come out of eternity.

Marguerite Duras

#21. 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

#22. My memory of men is never lit up and illuminated like my memory of women.

Marguerite Duras

#23. 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

#24. One must talk. That's how it is. One must.

Marguerite Duras

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. Stormy skies, says Ernesto. He grieved for them. Summer rain. Childhood.

Marguerite Duras

#30. Drinking isn't necessarily the same as wanting to die. But you can't drink without thinking you're killing yourself.

Marguerite Duras