Marguerite Duras Quotes

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

“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.”

Source: The Lover

“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.”

Source: The Lover

“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 book Emily L.

Source: Emily L.

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

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

Marguerite Duras Quotes about love

“Soon you give up, don't look for her anymore, either in the town or at night or in the daytime.
Even so you have managed to live that love in the only way possible for you. Losing it before it happened.”

Source: The Lover

Marguerite Duras book The Malady of Death

Source: The Malady of Death

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

“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.”

The Chimneys of India Song, from Practicalities (1987, trans. 1990).

“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?”

Source: The Lover

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

Source: The Ravishing of Lol Stein

Marguerite Duras book The Malady of Death

Source: The Malady of Death

Marguerite Duras Quotes

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

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

Marguerite Duras book Blue Eyes, Black Hair

Source: Blue Eyes, Black Hair

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

“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.”

Source: Hiroshima Mon Amour

“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.”

Source: The Lover

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

Source: The Lover

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

Source: The Ravishing of Lol Stein

“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.”

Source: The Lover

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

Source: The Lover

“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.”

Source: The Ravishing of Lol Stein

Marguerite Duras book Emily L.

Source: Emily L.

“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 book Blue Eyes, Black Hair

Source: Blue Eyes, Black Hair

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

“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.”

Source: Summer Rain

“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.”

Source: Writing

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

Source: The Lover

“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.”

“Men like women who write, even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country.”

Source: Summer Rain

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

“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.”

“a writer is a foreign country”

“Banality is sometimes striking.”

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

Source: Hiroshima Mon Amour

“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.”

Source: The Ravishing of Lol Stein

Marguerite Duras book Blue Eyes, Black Hair

Source: Blue Eyes, Black Hair

“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.”

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

“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.”

The Chimneys of India Song, from Practicalities (1987, trans. 1990).

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

Tourists in Paris, from Outside: Selected Writings (1984).

“Acting doesn't bring anything to a text. On the contrary, it detracts from it.”

Ce qui remplit le temps c'est vraiment de le perdre.
Wasting Time, from Practicalities (1987, trans. 1990).

“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.”

International Herald Tribune (28 March 1990).

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

Alcohol, from Practicalities (1987, trans. 1990).