Quotes from Marguerite Duras

Estoy inmersa en una tristeza que ya esperaba y que solo procede de mí. Que siempre he sido triste [...] Que hoy esa tristeza, aún reconociendo que se trata de la misma que siempre he sentido, se me parece tanto que casi podría darle mi nombre

ufkun, renksiz, deÄŸiÅŸken, s?n?rlanmas? imkâns?z bir yerlerinde bir sald?r? baÅŸl?yor. zihnin bir yerlerinde bir sald?r? baÅŸl?yor, bedende ise giderek artan bir rahats?zl?k, daha önceki hiçbirinin an?s?na indirgenemez cinsten, kendi üslubunu arayan bir rahats?zl?k.

Anlatt???m öykü gibi sürüyle öykü vard?r, dedi. Herhalde onu yanl?? deÄŸerlendiriyorsun. -Nedeni öykü deÄŸil, dedim, biraz klasik bile say?l?r bu öykü. Hafifçe alayl? gülümsedi... -Peki öyleyse? -Öyküyle ilgisi yok. Çok yorucu bir ÅŸey bu...ondan...

You ask how loving can happen—the emotion of loving. She answers: Perhaps a sudden lapse in the logic of the universe.

I already know a thing or two. I know it's not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction or costliness of their finery. I know the problem lies elsewhere. I don't know where.

Boire ce n'est pas obligatoirement vouloir mourir, non. Mais on ne peut pas boire sans penser qu'on se tue. Vivre avec l'alcool, c'est vivre avec la mort à la portée du main. Ce qui empêche de se tuer quand on est fou de l'ivresse alcoolique, c'est l'idée qu'une fois mort on ne boira plus.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

The best way to fill time is to waste it.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.