Marguerite Duras Quotes

Quotes about:

• You are what you are and that fascinates me.

  Marguerite Duras

  23 Copy quote

• When the past is recaptured by the imagination, breath is put back into life.

  Marguerite Duras

  Past, Imagination, Breaths

  13 Copy quote

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

  Marguerite Duras

  Whole Life, Tidying Up, Whole

  21 Copy quote

• 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

  Love, Philosophical, Men

  Marguerite Duras (1993). “Practicalities”, p.41, Grove Press

  44 Copy quote

• 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

  Sweet, I Like You, Night

  71 Copy quote

• The best way to fill time is to waste it.

  Marguerite Duras

  Time, Work, Way

  Marguerite Duras (1993). “Practicalities”, p.123, Grove Press

  69 Copy quote

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

  Marguerite Duras

  Achieve, Where You Are, Get Away

  Marguerite Duras (2011). “The Lover”, p.23, Pantheon

  41 Copy quote

• Very early in my life it was too late.

  Marguerite Duras

  Too Late, Late

  Marguerite Duras (2011). “The Lover”, p.4, Pantheon

  64 Copy quote

• 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

  Children, Book, Reading

  55 Copy quote

• 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.

  Marguerite Duras

  Men, Impossible, Affair

  Marguerite Duras (1993). “Practicalities”, p.35, Grove Press

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Memories, Long, Body

  Marguerite Duras, Duras (1993). “Summer Rain”, Scribner Paper Fiction

  40 Copy quote

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

  Marguerite Duras

  Love, Men, He Man

  Marguerite Duras (1993). “Practicalities”, p.125, Grove Press

  23 Copy quote

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

  Marguerite Duras

  Blessing, Vacation, Boredom

  39 Copy quote

• 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

  Passion, Sadness, Sanity

  Marguerite Duras (2013). “The Ravishing of Lol Stein”, p.54, Pantheon

  55 Copy quote

• 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

  Beautiful, Thinking, Years

  Marguerite Duras (2011). “The Lover”, p.3, Pantheon

  43 Copy quote

• 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

  Beautiful, Lying, Thinking

  52 Copy quote

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

  Marguerite Duras

  Country, Writing, Men

  Marguerite Duras (1993). “Practicalities”, p.66, Grove Press

  28 Copy quote

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

  Marguerite Duras

  Mom, Mother, People

  Marguerite Duras (1993). “Practicalities”, p.49, Grove Press

  37 Copy quote

• Oh, how good it is to be with someone, sometimes.

  Marguerite Duras

  Sometimes

  33 Copy quote

• 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

  Madness, Knows

  Marguerite Duras (2015). “Hiroshima Mon Amour”, p.34, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  23 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Writing, Ideas

  Marguerite Duras (1998). “Writing”, Brookline Books

  10 Copy quote

• Banality is sometimes striking.

  Marguerite Duras

  Sometimes, Banality

  Marguerite Duras (2015). “Hiroshima Mon Amour”, p.93, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  5 Copy quote

• ...as long as nothing happens between them, the memory is cursed with what hasn't happened.

  Marguerite Duras

  Memories, Long, Lust

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Beach, Book, Garden

  21 Copy quote

• 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

  Love, Moving, Enough

  Marguerite Duras (2011). “The Lover”, p.37, Pantheon

  38 Copy quote

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