Marguerite Duras Quotes

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

Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable. A journalist is someone who looks at the world and the way it works, someone who takes a close look at things every day and reports what she sees, someone who represents the world, the event, for others. She cannot do her work without judging what she sees.

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

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

The thing that's between us is fascination, and the fascination resides in our being alike. Whether you're a man or a woman, the fascination resides in finding out that we're alike.

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.

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

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

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

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

The best way to fill time is to waste it.

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

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

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.

Alcohol doesn't console, it doesn't fill up anyone's psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

People come to Paris, to the capital, to give their lives a sense of belonging, of an almost mythical participation in society.

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.

Nowhere is one more alone than in Paris ... and yet surrounded by crowds. Nowhere is one more likely to incur greater ridicule. And no visit is more essential.

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

There are many women who write as they think they should write - to imitate men and make a place for themselves in literature.

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.

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

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.

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

I know all one can know when one knows nothing.

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.

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.

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

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.

That she had so completely recovered her sanity was a source of sadness to her. One should never be cured of one's passion.

A prolonged silence ensues. The reason for the silence is our growing interest one for the other. No one is aware of it, no one yet; no one? am I quite sure?

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.

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

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.

Their voices reach out into the empty yard, plunge deep into the hills, go right through the heart.

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

Banality is sometimes striking.

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

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

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

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

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.