Duras Marguerite Quotes & Sayings

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

Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable. — 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

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

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

She opens her eyes, says: Stop lying. She says she hopes she'll never know anything, anything in the world, the way you do. She says: I don't want to know anything the way you do, with that death-derived certainty, that hopeless monotony, the same every day of your life, every night, and that deadly routine of lovelessness.
She says: It's day, everything is about to begin, except you, you never begin.
She goes back to sleep. You ask her why she sleeps, what weariness she has to rest from, what monumental weariness. — 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

We, her children, are heroic, dersperate. — Marguerite Duras

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

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

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

The best way to fill time is to waste it. — Marguerite Duras

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

a writer is a foreign country — Marguerite Duras

Marguerite Duras was a very good friend of mine and an intellectual hero. She was also a sort of mother figure. Of course she was an influence. — Claire Denis

Banality is sometimes striking. — Marguerite Duras

I am not a great French woman. George Sand, Marguerite Duras and Simone de Beauvoir are great French women. — Juliette Binoche

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

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

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

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

The French are pretty thin-skinned. The few times I mentioned a French writer in 'City Boy,' the relatives would ring up in high dudgeon. I once wrote a mocking review of Marguerite Duras in the 'New York Review of Books,' and good friends of mine in France got very angry. — Edmund White

I was full of doubts, of course, not a particularly bad way to be, but I didn't know that. Doubting so much made me suffer, but I could have saved myself the anxiety and simply doubted, without any problem. I was unaware that to doubt is to write. Marguerite Duras would say so in 1995, toward the end of her days: I can say what I like, but I shall never know why people write and how it is people don't write. In life, there comes a time, and I think it is total, that we cannot escape, where we doubt everything: that doubt is writing. — Enrique Vila-Matas

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

Oh, I'd like to show you my gratitude, show you how ugly I am, how impossible it is to love me. I'd like to offer you that. — 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

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

I can relate to Marguerite Duras even though I'm not French, nor have I been consumed by love for an East Asian man. I can life inside Alice Munro's skin. But I can't relate to my own mother. My body is full of sentences and moments, my heart resplendent with lovely turns of phrases, but neither is able to be touched by another. — Rabih Alameddine

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

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

I don't have general views about anything, except social injustice. — Marguerite Duras

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

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

Stormy skies, says Ernesto. He grieved for them. Summer rain. Childhood. — Marguerite Duras

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

Very early in my life it was too late. — 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

I have never waited for anything the way I've waited for today, when nothing will happen. — Marguerite Duras

Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met. — Marguerite Duras

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

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

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

One day,I was already old, a man came up to me in the street. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To write," Marguerite Duras remarked, "is also not to speak. It is to keep silent. It is to howl noiselessly. — Terry Tempest Williams

You are what you are and that fascinates me. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's here we are at the heart of our common fate, the fact that all three of us are our mother's children, the children of a candid creature murdered by society. We're on the side of the society which has reduced her to despair. Because of what's been done to our mother, so amiable, so trusting, we hate life, we hate ourselves. — Marguerite Duras

In love there are no vacations. No such thing. Love has to be lived fully with its boredom and all that. — 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