Marguerite Duras Quotes

69 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
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.

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
The best way to fill time is to waste it.

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

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
Writing also means not speaking. Keeping silent. Screaming without sound. A writer is often quite restful; she listens a lot. She doesn't speak much because it's impossible to speak to someone about a book one has written, and especially about a book one is writing.

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

Marguerite Duras
Fear is my main point of reference. Causing fear is what constitutes evil.

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

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
It's afterwards you realize that the feeling of happiness you had with a man didn't neccessarily prove that you loved him.

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
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
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.

Marguerite Duras
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.

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

Marguerite Duras
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
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
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. When it loses its blood, its author stops recognizing it. And first and foremost it must be never be dictated to a secretary, however capable she may be, nor ever given to a publisher to read at that stage.

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
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.

Marguerite Duras