Top 120 Marguerite Duras Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “And then, one day, my love, you come out of eternity.”

— Marguerite Duras

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

— Marguerite Duras

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

— Marguerite Duras

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

— Marguerite Duras

56. “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

57. “My memory of men is never lit up and illuminated like my memory of women.”

— Marguerite Duras

58. “It’s while it’s being lived that life is immortal, while it’s still alive. Immortality is not a matter of more or less time, its not really a question of immortality but of something else that remains unknown. It’s as untrue to say it’s without beginning or end as to say it begins and ends with the life of the spirit, since it partakes both of the spirit and of the pursuit of the void.”

— Marguerite Duras

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

— Marguerite Duras

60. “You ask: Why is the malady of death fatal? She answers: Because whoever has it doesn’t know he’s a carrier, of death. And also because he’s like to die without any life to die to, and without even knowing that’s what he’s doing.”

— Marguerite Duras

61. “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

62. “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

63. “Banality is sometimes striking.”

— Marguerite Duras

64. “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

65. “You are what you are and that fascinates me.”

— Marguerite Duras

66. “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

67. “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

68. “Nunca he escrito, creyendo hacerlo, nunca he amado, creyendo amar, nunca he hecho nada salvo esperar delante de la puerta cerrada.”

— Marguerite Duras

69. “It’s only women who are not really quite women at all, frivolous women who have no idea, who neglect repairs.”

— Marguerite Duras

70. “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.”

— Marguerite Duras

71. “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

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

— Marguerite Duras

73. “He says, You only came because I’m rich. I say that’s how I desire him, with his money, that when I first saw him he was already in his car, in his money, so I can’t say what I’d have done if he’d been different.”

— Marguerite Duras

74. “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.”

— Marguerite Duras

75. “I feel a sadness I expected and which comes only from myself. I say I’ve always been sad. That I can see the same sadness in photos of myself when I was small. That today, recognizing it as the sadness I’ve always had, I could almost call it by my own name, it’s so like me.”

— Marguerite Duras

76. “Kisses on the body bring tears.”

— Marguerite Duras

77. “All that remains of that minute is time in all its purity, bone-white time.”

— Marguerite Duras

78. “Pouvoir, au milieu de la folie, redevenir humaine.”

— Marguerite Duras

79. “You didn’t have to attract desire. Either it was in the woman who aroused it or it didn’t exist. Either it was there at first glance or else it had never been.”

— Marguerite Duras

80. “It’s here we are at the heart of our common fate, the fact that all three of us are our mother’s children, the children of a candid creature murdered by society. We’re on the side of the society which has reduced her to despair. Because of what’s been done to our mother, so amiable, so trusting, we hate life, we hate ourselves.”

— Marguerite Duras

81. “She lavishes pain with generosity.”

— Marguerite Duras

82. “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

83. “Some people are like that – closed – they can’t learn from anyone. Us, for example, we can’t learn anything, neither I from you nor you from me, nor from anyone, nor from anything, nor from what happens.”

— Marguerite Duras

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

— Marguerite Duras

85. “Sono sempre emozionanti, le somiglianze fra donne che non si assomigliano.”

— Marguerite Duras

86. “It was the men I deceived the most that I loved the most.”

— Marguerite Duras

87. “In a thousand years time this day will have existed for a thousand years to the day. And the ignorance of the whole world about what they’ve said today will have a date too.”

— Marguerite Duras

88. “Es la mayor injusticia del tiempo, de todos los tiempos: y si uno no llora por eso una sola vez en su vida no llora por nada. Y no llorar nunca es no vivir.”

— Marguerite Duras

89. “You give me a great desire to love.”

— Marguerite Duras

90. “Even so you have managed to live that love in the only way possible for you. Losing it before it happened.”

— Marguerite Duras

91. “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

92. “One must talk. That’s how it is. One must.”

— Marguerite Duras

93. “You think of outside your room, of the streets of the town, the lonely little squares over by the station, of those winter Saturdays all alike.”

— Marguerite Duras

94. “Their voices reach out into the empty yard, plunge deep into the hills, go right through the heart.”

— Marguerite Duras

95. “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

96. “We tell each other things that have no relation to the afternoon’s events or the coming night but that relate to God, to his absence that is so present, like the breasts of the young girl, so young before the immensity of what is to come.”

— Marguerite Duras

97. “She is naked beneath her dark hair; naked, naked, dark hair.”

— Marguerite Duras

98. “Women should not let lovers read the books they write.”

— Marguerite Duras

99. “Oh, I’d like to show you my gratitude, show you how ugly I am, how impossible it is to love me. I’d like to offer you that.”

— Marguerite Duras

100. “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