Marguerite Duras Quotes - Page 2

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

You alone became the outer surface of my life, the side I never see, and you will be that, the unknown part of me, until I die.

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.

I know all one can know when one knows nothing.

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

Life is only lived full-time by women with children.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

We’re in the vanguard of a nameless battle, a battle without arms or bloodshed or glory: we’re in the vanguard of waiting.

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

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

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.

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

What stops you killing yourself when you're intoxicated out of your mind is the thought that once you're dead you won't be able to drink any more.

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.