Marguerite Duras Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Marguerite Duras.
Famous Quotes By Marguerite Duras
I am dead. I have no desire for you. My body no longer wants the one who doesn't love. — Marguerite Duras
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
As long as nothing happens between them, the memory is cursed with what hasn't happened. — Marguerite Duras
Words don't change their shape, they change their meaning, their function ... They don't have a meaning of their own any more, they refer to other words that you don't know, that you've never read or heard ... you've never seen their shape, but you feel ... you suspect ... they correspond to ... an empty space inside you ... or in the universe ... — Marguerite Duras
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
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
Then the girl spoke to the child. She told him she'd rather it remain this way between them.
That she'd rather their story not move from this place, even if the child didn't understand her; that it remain in this desire, even if that meant she put herself to death. Not a real death, mind you, but a dead death, where you don't hurt, where you're never sad, you're never punished, nothing.
She said, 'It should be completely impossible.'
She said, 'It should be desperate. — Marguerite Duras
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
Listen to me. I know something else. It will begin again. 200,000 dead and 80,000 wounded in nine seconds. Those are the official figures. It will begin again. It will be 10,000 degrees on the earth. Ten thousand suns, people will say. The asphalt will burn. Chaos will prevail. An entire city will be lifted off the ground, and fall back to earth in ashes ... I meet you. I remember you. Who are you? You're destroying me. You're good for me. How could I know this city was tailor-made for love? How could I know you fit my body like a glove? I like you. How unlikely. I like you. How slow all of a sudden. How sweet. You cannot know. You're destroying me. You're good for me. You're destroying me. You're good for me. I have time. Please, devour me. Deform me to the point of ugliness. Why not you? — Marguerite Duras
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
The outrage was on the scale of God. My younger brother was immortal and they hadn't noticed. Immortality had been concealed in my brother's body while he was alive, and we hadn't noticed that it dwelt there. Now my brother's body was dead, and immortality with it ... And the error, the outrage, filled the whole universe. — Marguerite Duras
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
Their voices reach out into the empty yard, plunge deep into the hills, go right through the heart. — Marguerite Duras
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
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
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
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
Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met. — Marguerite Duras
I don't have general views about anything, except social injustice. — Marguerite Duras
I meet you. I remember you. Who are you? You're destroying me. You're good for me. How could I know this city was tailor-made for love? How could I know you fit my body like a glove? I like you. How unlikely. I like you. How slow all of a sudden. How sweet. You cannot know. You're destroying me. You're good for me. You're destroying me. You're good for me. I have time. Please, devour me. Deform me to the point of ugliness. Why not you? Why not you in this city and in this night, so like other cities and other nights you can hardly tell the difference? I beg of you. — Marguerite Duras
I have never waited for anything the way I've waited for today, when nothing will happen. — Marguerite Duras
Stormy skies, says Ernesto. He grieved for them. Summer rain. Childhood. — Marguerite Duras
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
People come to Paris, to the capital, to give their lives a sense of belonging, of an almost mythical participation in society. — Marguerite Duras
Very early in my life it was too late. — Marguerite Duras
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
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
People were used to those slow human speeds on both land and sea, to those delays, those waitings on the wind or fair weather, to those expectations of shipwreck, sun, and death. The liners the little white girl knew were among the last mailboats in the world. It was while she was young that the first airlines were started, which were gradually to deprive mankind of journeys across the sea. (The Lover) — Marguerite Duras
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
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
I think about you. But I don't say it anymore. — Marguerite Duras
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
A book consists of two layers: on top, the readable layer ... and underneath, a layer that was inaccessible. You only sense its existence in a moment of distraction from the literal reading, the way you see childhood through a child. It would take forever to tell what you see, and it would be pointless. — Marguerite Duras
I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate. — Marguerite Duras
I acquired that drinker's face before I drank. Drink only confirmed it. The space for it existed in me. — Marguerite Duras
One day,I was already old, a man came up to me in the street. — Marguerite Duras
It has been my face. It's got older still, or course, but less, comparatively, than it would otherwise have done. It's scored with deep, dry wrinkles, the skin is cracked. But my face hasn't collapsed, as some with fine feature have done. It's kept the same contours, but its substance has been laid waste. I have a face laid waste. — Marguerite Duras
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
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
It's while it's being lived that life is immortal, while it's still alive. Immortality is not a matter of more or less time, its not really a question of immortality but of something else that remains unknown. It's as untrue to say it's without beginning or end as to say it begins and ends with the life of the spirit, since it partakes both of the spirit and of the pursuit of the void. — Marguerite Duras
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
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
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
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
Sometimes we have to avoid thinking about the problems life presents. Otherwise we'd suffocate. - Hiroshima Mon Amour, Marguerite Duras — Marguerite Duras
Don't be afraid anymore. Not of anyone. Not of anything. Nothing. Ever again. Listen to me: not ever again. — Marguerite Duras
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
And then, one day, my love, you come out of eternity. — Marguerite Duras
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
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
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
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
It was the men I deceived the most that I loved the most. — Marguerite Duras
She lavishes pain with generosity. — Marguerite Duras
A woman's work, from the time she gets up to the time she goes to bed, is as hard as a day at war, worse than a man's working day ... To men, women's work was like the rain-bringing clouds, or the rain itself. The task involved was carried out every day as regularly as sleep. So men were happy - men in the Middle Ages, men at the time of the Revolution, and men in 1986: everything in the garden was lovely. — Marguerite Duras
One must talk. That's how it is. One must. — Marguerite Duras
Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book. Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome. — Marguerite Duras
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
It's not that you have to achieve anything, it's that you have to get away from where you are. — Marguerite Duras
Oh, how good it is to be with someone, sometimes. — Marguerite Duras
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
Even so you have managed to live that love in the only way possible for you. Losing it before it happened. — Marguerite Duras
When the past is recaptured by the imagination, breath is put back into life. — Marguerite Duras
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
Years after the war, after marriages, children, divorces, books, he came to Paris with his wife. He phoned her. It's me. She recognized him at once from the voice. He said, I just wanted to hear your voice. She said, it's me, hello. He was nervous, afraid, as before. His voice suddenly trembled. And with the trembling, suddenly, she heard again the voice of China. He knew she'd begun writing books, he'd heard about it through her mother whom he'd met again in Saigon. And about her younger brother, and he'd been grieved for her. Then he didn't know what to say. And then he told her. Told her that it was as before, that he still loved her, he could never stop loving her, that he'd love her until death. — Marguerite Duras
Women must find their own answer. That's the important thing. I'm no longer interested in books about women written by men. Even if I could believe in their objectivity, I just can't find their opinions relevant. Now I will only believe what a woman has to say about women, because even if it's not entirely true, it's her struggle and she's on the way to the answer.
Many of you seek masculine approval. Even though you have inside you your way of talking and writing, you have mountains of it inside you, and even though it is enough to begin expressing yourselves so long as it is with your vocabulary, your abstractions, and your own conceptualization, I think you are still afraid of the master: men. Of their judgment. As long as you have this fear, you will not progress. I think the future belongs to women. Men have been completely dethroned. Their rhetoric is stale, used up. We must move on the rhetoric of women, one that is anchored in the organism, in the body. — Marguerite Duras
Men like women who write, even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country. — Marguerite Duras
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
He wanted to pay her; he thought women ought to be paid for keeping men from dying or going out of their minds. — Marguerite Duras
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
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
I answered that what I wanted more than anything else in the world was to write, nothing else but that, nothing. Jealous. She's jealous. No answer, just a quick glance immediately averted, a slight shrug, unforgettable. I'll be the first to leave. There are still a few years to wait before she loses me, loses this one of her children. For the sons there's nothing to fear. But this one, she knows, one day she'll go, she'll manage to escape. — Marguerite Duras
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
It's only women who are not really quite women at all, frivolous women who have no idea, who neglect repairs. — Marguerite Duras
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
Yes, the heat lacerated the heart. And alone she resisted it, entire, virgin, the envy of the sea. — Marguerite Duras
Night.
The beach and the sea are in darkness.
A dog passes, going toward the sea wall.
No one walks on the boardwalk, but, on the benches lining it, people sit. They relax. Are silent. Separated from one another. They do not speak.
The traveler passes. He walks slowly, he goes in the same direction as the dog.
He stops. Returns. He seems to be out for a walk. He starts off again.
His face is no longer visible.
The sea is calm. No wind.
The traveler returns. The dog does not return. The sea begins to rise, it seems. Its sounds getting closer. Muffled thudding coming from the river's many mouths. Somber sky. — Marguerite Duras
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
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
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
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
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
Life is only lived full-time by women with children. — Marguerite Duras
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
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
Because he doesn't know he carries within him a supreme elegance, I say it for him. — Marguerite Duras
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
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
You are what you are and that fascinates me. — Marguerite Duras
All that remains of that minute is time in all its purity, bone-white time. — Marguerite Duras
It was the men I deceived the most I loved the most. — Marguerite Duras
She had lived her early years as though she were waiting for something she might, but never did, become. — Marguerite Duras
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