One reads thousands of books, of poets, modern and ancient, as one meets thousands of people. What remains of it all is hard to tell.
Marguerite YourcenarI don't think I ever relinquish a person I have known, and surely not my fictional characters. I see them, I hear them, with a clarity that I would call hallucinatory if hallucination didn't mean something else ... A character whom we create can never die, any more than a friend can die ... Through [my characters] I've lived many parallel lives.
Marguerite YourcenarI knew that good like bad becomes a routine, that the temporary tends to endure, that what is external permeates to the inside, and that the mask, given time, comes to be the face itself.
Marguerite YourcenarI believe that friendship, like love, of which it is a particular kind, requires nearly as much art as a successful choreography.
Marguerite YourcenarIf you love life you also love the past, because it is the present as it has survived in memory." Translation by David Downie
Marguerite YourcenarLittle soul, gentle and drifting, guest and companion of my body, now you will dwell below in pallid places, stark and bare; there you will abandon your play of yore. But one moment still, let us gaze together on these familiar shores, on these objects which doubtless we shall not see again....Let us try, if we can, to enter into death with open eyes.
Marguerite Yourcenar