Marguerite Duras Quotes

69 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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.

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
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
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
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
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
War is a generality, so are the inevitabilities of war, including death.

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

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

Marguerite Duras
If I hadn't begun writing, I would have become an incurable alcoholic.

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
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
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
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
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
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
Acting doesn't bring anything to a text. On the contrary, it detracts from it.

Marguerite Duras
Solitude is the thing without which one does nothing.

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

Marguerite Duras
The person who writes books must always be enveloped by a separation from others.

Marguerite Duras