Marguerite Duras Quotes

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

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

You are what you are and that fascinates me.

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.

The best way to fill time is to waste it.

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.

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

Very early in my life it was too late.

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.

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.

That she had so completely recovered her sanity was a source of sadness to her. One should never be cured of one's passion.

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

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

The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Banality is sometimes striking.

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.

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