Top 49 Marguerite Young Quotes
#2. Reading Marguerite Young's 1,200-page Miss MacIntosh, My Darling was like slipping into a luxurious opium dream.
Steven Moore
#3. Miss MacIntosh, My Darling stands out in my mind as the most significant innovative novel since Ulysses and The Waves. Marguerite Young has added epic grandeur to the philosophical novel. Every page gleams with the poetry of existence.
Nona Balakian
#4. I never thought of myself as either a woman or a man. I thought of myself as a person who was born to a writer, who was doomed to be a writer.
Marguerite Young
#5. If you understand hallucination and illusion, you don't blindly follow any leader. You must know if the person is sane or insane, over the abyss.
Marguerite Young
#6. The first poem I ever wrote, about loss, when I was 5 years old, expressed the themes of everything I would ever write.
Marguerite Young
#7. If there is no certain reality, the idea of following a leader must be scrutinized.
Marguerite Young
#8. If you know anything about James Whitcomb Riley, you know that Little Orphan Annie is one of the most fantastic characters who ever lived in America before Charlie Chaplin.
Marguerite Young
#9. I believe that all my work explores the human desire or obsession for utopias, and the structure of all my works is the search for utopias lost and rediscovered.
Marguerite Young
#10. There were also some cruel reviews by women, but the tone of the male reviewers, sometimes hysterical, was different. I have suffered, but I don't want to name names-but there have been men who have seemed to want to destroy me or my writing, men I don't even know.
Marguerite Young
#11. If you don't have obsessions, don't write. my characters are obsessed.
Marguerite Young
#12. For all dead loves and all remembered things. I have travelled through many seas.
Marguerite Young
#13. He is but as the stubble of the field, and yet he has no beard.
Marguerite Young
#14. Forgive this breaking body as you forgive the star, the star whispering in the wind when the star is no more. Forgive this secret none can tell. None can tell and live.
Marguerite Young
#15. I would never write realistic prose. I don't like people who try to write in a poetic style, but in the course of their book abandon it for realism, and weave back and forth like drunkards between the surreal and the real.
Marguerite Young
#16. A good writer cannot avoid having social consciousness. I don't mean this about small pieces of writing, but about a big book. If it's a big book, there has to be more than one undertow.
Marguerite Young
#17. I've been willing to go for years without publishing. That's been my career.
Marguerite Young
#18. Flowers are the bright remembrances of youth; they waft us back, with their bland odorous breath, the joyous hours that only young life knows, ere we have learnt that this fair earth hides graves.
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess Of Blessington
#20. 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
#21. I think there is a rage against women. I've come to see that now although at the time I did not notice it. I was preoccupied with my teaching and my writing.
Marguerite Young
#22. I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could, but it takes devotion and talent.
Marguerite Young
#23. At the age of 18 all young poets are sure they will be dead at 21 - of old age.
Marguerite Young
#24. I would say my theme has always been paradise lost, always the lost cause, the lost leader, the lost utopia.
Marguerite Young
#25. All my writing is about the recognition that there is no single reality. But the beauty of it is that you nevertheless go on, walking towards utopia, which may not exist, on a bridge which might end before you reach the other side.
Marguerite Young
#26. I think most people don't like others who, without a voice of their own, emulate the other. I certainly don't want anybody just to pick up my thoughts and hand them back to me.
Marguerite Young
#27. I knew Anais Nin, who called me after I had been away for a few years. She was seeking help because at that time no one would give her a decent review. She was made fun of.
Marguerite Young
#28. A young musician plays scales in his room and only bores his family. A beginning writer, on the other hand, sometimes has the misfortune of getting into print.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#29. A lawyer I once knew told me of a strange case, a suffragette who had never married. After her death, he opened her trunk and discovered 50 wedding gowns.
Marguerite Young
#31. Twice in his life Eugene Victor Debs took the long leap to the Ultima Thule of prison, passing beyond the realm of the acceptable into the nonacceptable, from respectability into the criminal community of the monster who was an enemy to the people.
Marguerite Young
#32. I don't believe there can be a poetic novel without political consciousness. I have a strong political conscience.
Marguerite Young
#33. In France, a woman may forget that she is neither young nor handsome; for the absence of these claims to attention does not expose her to be neglected by the male sex.
Marguerite Gardiner
#34. I never fantasized or invented a thing, not one thing. I knew every single thing I ever wrote about.
Marguerite Young
#35. I'm as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am, more so, than by Eliot. Actually, I'm much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormons.
Marguerite Young
#36. When you have examined all the illusions of life and know that there isn't any reality, but you nevertheless go on, then you are a mature human being. You accept the idea that it is all mask and illusion and that people are in disguise. You see the crumbl
Marguerite Young
#37. Every heart is the other heart. Every soul is the other soul. Every face is the other face. The individual is the one illusion.
Marguerite Young
#38. Some of the poetic writers who insert passages of realism in their texts have no underlying philosophy to uphold them, and revert to realism.
Marguerite Young
#39. She would hang a sign in the restaurant window--Owt to luntsch. Bee bak in a whale. For she could not spell either.
Marguerite Young
#41. All the books I have written have been one book, from the beginning.
Marguerite Young
#42. I am in love with whatever is eccentric, devious, strange, singular, unique, out of this world-and with life as an incalculable, a chaotic thing, meaningful above and beyond the necessary and elemental data of my subject.
Marguerite Young
#43. Dreiser ... I love ... and almost wouldn't speak to anyone who ever attacked him.
Marguerite Young
#44. The first money I ever had was when I received an award from the American Association of University Women.
Marguerite Young
#45. All creatures are flawed, but out of the flaw may come the universe.
Marguerite Young
#46. I've known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you're more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.
Marguerite Duras
#47. Is it experimental to have been influenced by the Bible? By Saint Augustine?
Marguerite Young
#48. I would teach from nine to four, sleep an hour, and write from six until midnight, night after night.
Marguerite Young