Top 91 Quotes & Sayings by Marguerite Duras

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

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

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.

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.

Alcohol is barren. The words a man speaks in the night of drunkenness fade like the darkness itself at the coming of day.

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

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.

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

Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable.

The best way to fill time is to waste it.

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.

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.

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

It's only women who are not really quite women at all, frivolous women who have no idea, who neglect repairs.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

A woman's work, from the time she gets up to the time she goes to bed, is as hard as a day at war, worse than a man's working day. ... To men, women's work was like the rain-bringing clouds, or the rain itself. The task involved was carried out every day as regularly as sleep. So men were happy - men in the Middle Ages, men at the time of the Revolution, and men in 1986: everything in the garden was lovely.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

I know all one can know when one knows nothing.

Very early in my life it was too late.

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

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.

Banality is sometimes striking.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

You are what you are and that fascinates me.

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.

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.