L'amant Marguerite Duras Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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