Quotes from Marguerite Duras

It has been my face. It's got older still, or course, but less, comparatively, than it would otherwise have done. It's scored with deep, dry wrinkles, the skin is cracked. But my face hasn't collapsed, as some with fine feature have done. It's kept the same contours, but its substance has been laid waste. I have a face laid waste.

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.

a writer is a foreign country

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...

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.

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

Muy pronto en mi vida fue demasiado tarde.

Je n'ai jamais écrit, croyant le faire, je n'ai jamais aimé, croyant aimer, je n'ai jamais rien fait qu'attendre devant la porte fermée.

Pourquoi nier l'évidente nécessité de la mémoire?

Sometimes we have to avoid thinking about the problems life presents. Otherwise we'd suffocate. - Hiroshima Mon Amour, Marguerite Duras

Don't be afraid anymore. Not of anyone. Not of anything. Nothing. Ever again. Listen to me: not ever again.

Et puis il le lui avait dit. Il lui avait dit que c'était comme avant, qu'il l'aimait encore, qu'il ne pourrait jamais cesser de l'aimer, qu'il l'aimerait jusqu'à sa mort.

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

I had the face of pleasure, and yet I had no knowledge of pleasure. There was no mistaking that face.

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 delight

When you wept it was just over yourself and not because of the marvelous impossibility of reaching her through the difference that separates you.

La escritura: la escritura llega como el viento, está desnuda, es la tinta, es lo escrito, y pasa como nada pasa en la vida, nada, excepto eso, la vida.

I want to write. I've already told my mother: That's what I want to do-write. No answer the first time. Then she asks, Write what? I say, Books, novels. [...] She's against it, it's not worthy, it's not real work, it's nonsense. Later she said, A childish idea.

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

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.

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.

Pouvoir, au milieu de la folie, redevenir humaine

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.

Stormy skies, says Ernesto. He grieved for them. Summer rain. Childhood.