Top 120 Marguerite Duras Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Get rid of things or you’ll spend your whole life tidying up.”

— Marguerite Duras

2. “Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we’ve ever met.”

— Marguerite Duras

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

— Marguerite Duras

4. “Men like women who write. Even though they don’t say so. A writer is a foreign country.”

— Marguerite Duras

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5. “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.”

— Marguerite Duras

6. “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

7. “The best way to fill time is to waste it.”

— Marguerite Duras

8. “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

9. “Don’t be afraid anymore. Not of anyone. Not of anything. Nothing. Ever again. Listen to me: not ever again.”

— Marguerite Duras

10. “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.”

— Marguerite Duras

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

— Marguerite Duras

12. “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

13. “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

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

— Marguerite Duras

15. “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

16. “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

17. “I know all one can know when one knows nothing.”

— Marguerite Duras

18. “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

19. “We, her children, are heroic, dersperate.”

— Marguerite Duras

20. “I think about you. But I don’t say it anymore.”

— Marguerite Duras

21. “Very early in my life it was too late.”

— Marguerite Duras

22. “The story of my life doesn’t exist. Does not exist. There’s never any center to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one.”

— Marguerite Duras

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

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

— Marguerite Duras

27. “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

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

— Marguerite Duras

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

— Marguerite Duras

30. “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

31. “I acquired that drinker’s face before I drank. Drink only confirmed it. The space for it existed in me.”

— Marguerite Duras

32. “Writing was the only thing that populated my life and made it magic.”

— Marguerite Duras

33. “People come to Paris, to the capital, to give their lives a sense of belonging, of an almost mythical participation in society.”

— Marguerite Duras

34. “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.”

— Marguerite Duras

35. “Perhaps you’ll escape. Day and night, this obsession. It’s not that you have to achieve anything, it’s that you have to get away from where you are.”

— Marguerite Duras

36. “There are many women who write as they think they should write – to imitate men and make a place for themselves in literature.”

— Marguerite Duras

37. “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

38. “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

39. “I am dead. I have no desire for you. My body no longer wants the one who doesn’t love.”

— Marguerite Duras

40. “Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It’s absolutely unavoidable.”

— Marguerite Duras

41. “You’re always more unreal to yourself than other people are.”

— Marguerite Duras

42. “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

43. “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

44. “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

45. “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

46. “A prolonged silence ensues. The reason for the silence is our growing interest one for the other. No one is aware of it, no one yet; no one? am I quite sure?”

— Marguerite Duras

47. “Stormy skies, says Ernesto. He grieved for them. Summer rain. Childhood.”

— Marguerite Duras

48. “I see the war as like him, spreading everywhere, breaking in everywhere, stealing, imprisoning, always there, merged and mingled with everything, present in the body, in the mind, awake and asleep, all the time, a prey to the intoxicating passion of occupying that delightful territory, a child’s body, the bodies of those less strong, of conquered peoples. Because evil is there, at the gates, against the skin.”

— Marguerite Duras

49. “I have never waited for anything the way I’ve waited for today, when nothing will happen.”

— Marguerite Duras

50. “For that’s what a woman, a mother wants – to teach her children to take an interest in life. She knows it’s safer for them to be interested in other people’s happiness than to believe in their own.”

— Marguerite Duras