the press is too often a distorting mirror, which deforms the people and events it represents, making them seem bigger or smaller than they really are.
Marguerite YourcenarAnd nevertheless I have loved certain of my masters, and those strangely intimate though elusive relations existing between student and teacher, and the Sirens singing somewhere within the cracked voice of him who is first to reveal a new idea. The greatest seducer was not Alcibiades, afterall, it was Socrates.
Marguerite Yourcenar[On travel:] Who would be so besotted as to die without having made at least the round of this, his prison?
Marguerite YourcenarBut happiness is brittle, and if men and circumstances don't destroy it, it is threatened by ghosts.
Marguerite YourcenarA touch of madness is, I think, almost always necessary for constructing a destiny.
Marguerite YourcenarAncient and oriental civilizations were more sensitive than we are to the cycles of things; to the succession of generations, both divine and human; and to change within stasis. Western man is virtually alone in wanting to make his God into a fortress and personal immortality into a bulwark against time.
Marguerite Yourcenar