Marguerite Duras
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.Collection: Women
The best way to fill time is to waste it.Collection: Time
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.Collection: Nature
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.
Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable.
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.
I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.
In love there are no vacations. No such thing. Love has to be lived fully with its boredom and all that.
Heterosexuality is dangerous. It tempts you to aim at a perfect duality of desire.
Alcohol is barren. The words a man speaks in the night of drunkenness fade like the darkness itself at the coming of day.
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.
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.
It's only women who are not really quite women at all, frivolous women who have no idea, who neglect repairs.
It's afterwards you realize that the feeling of happiness you had with a man didn't necessarily prove that you loved him.
Men like women who write. Even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country.
When the past is recaptured by the imagination, breath is put back into life.Collection: Past
Get rid of things or you'll spend your whole life tidying up.Collection: Whole Life
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.Collection: Sweet
It’s not that you have to achieve anything, it’s that you have to get away from where you are.Collection: Achieve
Very early in my life it was too late.Collection: Too Late
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.Collection: Children
That she had so completely recovered her sanity was a source of sadness to her. One should never be cured of one's passion.Collection: Passion
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.Collection: Men
The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken.Collection: Memories
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.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Madness
Oh, how good it is to be with someone, sometimes.Collection: Sometimes
Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.Collection: Mom
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.Collection: Book
She had lived her early years as though she were waiting for something she might, but never did, become.Collection: Years
Banality is sometimes striking.Collection: Sometimes
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.Collection: Talking
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.Collection: Love
There are many women who write as they think they should write - to imitate men and make a place for themselves in literature.Collection: Writing
People come to Paris, to the capital, to give their lives a sense of belonging, of an almost mythical participation in society.Collection: Paris
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.Collection: Time
She represents the un-vowed aspiration of the male human being, his potential infidelity - and infidelity of a very special kind, which would lead him to the opposite of his wife, to the woman of wax whom he could model at will, make and unmake in any way he wished, even unto death.Collection: Opposites
Before they're plumbers or writers or taxi drivers or unemployed or journalists, before everything else, men are men. Whether heterosexual or homosexual. The only difference is that some of them remind you of it as soon as you meet them, and others wait for a little while.Collection: Men
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Memories
Their voices reach out into the empty yard, plunge deep into the hills, go right through the heart.Collection: Heart
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 delightCollection: Thinking
The outrage was on the scale of God. My younger brother was immortal and they hadn't noticed. Immortality had been concealed in my brother's body while he was alive, and we hadn't noticed that it dwelt there. Now my brother's body was dead, and immortality with it. ... And the error, the outrage, filled the whole universe.Collection: Death
Stormy skies, says Ernesto. He grieved for them. Summer rain. Childhood.Collection: Summer
I acquired that drinker's face before I drank. Drink only confirmed it. The space for it existed in me.Collection: Space
We, her children, are heroic, dersperate.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Hurt
...as long as nothing happens between them, the memory is cursed with what hasn't happened.Collection: Memories