Marguerite Duras Quotes

Marguerite Duras shares consoling, plain-spoken thoughts on love, journalism and change that feel like a quiet confession.

17 quotes

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

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

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

4. The best way to fill time is to waste it.

5. 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.

6. Frigidity is desire imagined by a woman who doesn't desire the man offering himself to her. It's the desire of a woman for a man who hasn't yet come to her, whom she doesn't yet know. She's faithful to this stranger even before she belongs to him. Frigidity is the non-desire for whatever is not him.

7. Frigidity is desire imagined by a woman who doesnt desire the man offering himself to her. Its the desire of a woman for a man who hasnt yet come to her, whom she doesnt yet know. Shes faithful to this stranger even before she belongs to him. Frigidity is the non-desire for whatever is not him.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.

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

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

14. 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.

15. 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?

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

17. I acquired that drinker's face before I drank. Drink only confirmed it. The space for it existed in me.