Want of passion is, I think, a very striking characteristic of Americans, not unrelated to their predilection for violence. For very few people truly have a passionate desire to achieve, and violence serves as a kind of substitute.
Marguerite Yourcenarage means nothing. If anything I feel that I'm still a child: eternity and childhood are my ages.
Marguerite YourcenarI believe that friendship, like love, of which it is a particular kind, requires nearly as much art as a successful choreography.
Marguerite Yourcenar[On travel:] Who would be so besotted as to die without having made at least the round of this, his prison?
Marguerite YourcenarThis city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?
Marguerite YourcenarSickness disgusts us with death, and we wish to get well, which is a way of wishing to live. But weakness and suffering, with manifold bodily woes, soon discourage the invalid from trying to regain ground: he tires of those respites which are but snares, of that faltering strength, those ardors cut short, and that perpetual lying in wait for the next attack.
Marguerite Yourcenar