[On travel:] Who would be so besotted as to die without having made at least the round of this, his prison?
Marguerite YourcenarThe world is big โฆ May it please the One who perchance is to expand the human heart to life's full measure.
Marguerite YourcenarThis city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?
Marguerite YourcenarI could say that all my books were conceived by the time I was twenty, although they were not to be written for another thirty or forty years. But perhaps this is true of most writersโthe emotional storage is done very early on.
Marguerite YourcenarAll happiness is a work of art: the smallest error falsifies it, the slightest hesitation alters it, the least heaviness spoils it, the slightest stupidity brutalizes it.
Marguerite YourcenarLife is atrocious, we know. But precisely because I expect little of the human condition, man's periods of felicity, his partial progress, his efforts to begin over again and continue, all seem to me like so many prodigies which nearly compensate for the monstrous mass of ills and defeats, of indifference and error. Catastrophe and ruin will come; disorder will triumph, but order will too, from time to time.
Marguerite Yourcenar