Best 88 quotes of Marguerite Duras on MyQuotes

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.

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.

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.

Alcohol doesn't console, it doesn't fill up anyone's psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God.

Alcohol is barren. The words a man speaks in the night of drunkenness fade like the darkness itself at the coming of day.

All that remains of that minute is time in all its purity, bone-white time.

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?

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.

a writer is a foreign country

Banality is sometimes striking.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Get rid of things or you'll spend your whole life tidying up.

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

He wanted to pay her; he thought women ought to be paid for keeping men from dying or going out of their minds.

I acquired that drinker's face before I drank. Drink only confirmed it. The space for it existed in me.

I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhoods and in all the lives that follow them, the mother represents madness. Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.

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

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.

I'm still there, watching those possessed children, as far away from the mystery now as I was then. 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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.

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.

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.

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.

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

It's only women who are not really quite women at all, frivolous women who have no idea, who neglect repairs.

It was the men I deceived the most that I loved the most.

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.

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.

Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable. A journalist is someone who looks at the world and the way it works, someone who takes a close look at things every day and reports what she sees, someone who represents the world, the event, for others. She cannot do her work without judging what she sees.

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

Men like women who write. Even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country.

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.

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.

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

Paradoxically, the freedom of Paris is associated with a persistent belief that nothing ever changes. Paris, they say, is the city that changes least. After an absence of twenty or thirty years, one still recognizes it.

People come to Paris, to the capital, to give their lives a sense of belonging, of an almost mythical participation in society.

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.

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

She represents the un-vowed aspiration of the male human being, his potential infidelity - and infidelity of a very special kind, which would lead him to the opposite of his wife, to the woman of wax whom he could model at will, make and unmake in any way he wished, even unto death.

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.