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Some people are like that - closed - they can't learn from anyone. Us, for example, we can't learn anything, neither I from you nor you from me, nor from anyone, nor from anything, nor from what happens.

Marguerite Duras

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Marguerite Duras
Age: 81 †
Born: 1914
Born: April 4
Died: 1996
Died: March 3
Author
Autobiographer
Feminist
Film Director
Journalist
Novelist
Philosopher
Playwright
Poet Lawyer
Publisher
Screenwriter
Writer
Gia Định Province
Marguerite Donnadieu
Marguerite Germaine Marie Donnadieu
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Closed
Neither
Example
Anyone
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More quotes by Marguerite Duras

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The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write.
Marguerite Duras
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That she had so completely recovered her sanity was a source of sadness to her. One should never be cured of one's passion.
Marguerite Duras
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Paradoxically, the freedom of Paris is associated with a persistent belief that nothing ever changes. Paris, they say, is the city that changes least. After an absence of twenty or thirty years, one still recognizes it.
Marguerite Duras
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The house a woman creates is a Utopia. She can't help it - can't help trying to interest her nearest and dearest not in happiness itself but in the search for it.
Marguerite Duras
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In a certain state of mind, all trace of feeling is banished. Whenever I remain silent in a certain way, I don't love you, have you noticed that?
Marguerite Duras
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The best way to fill time is to waste it.
Marguerite Duras
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I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.
Marguerite Duras
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One must talk. That's how it is. One must.
Marguerite Duras
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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.
Marguerite Duras
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I'm still there, watching those possessed children, as far away from the mystery now as I was then. I've never written, though I thought I wrote, never loved, though I thought I loved, never done anything but wait outside the closed door.
Marguerite Duras
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War is a generality, so are the inevitabilities of war, including death.
Marguerite Duras
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Men like women who write. Even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country.
Marguerite Duras
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Drinking isn't necessarily the same as wanting to die. But you can't drink without thinking you're killing yourself.
Marguerite Duras
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I acquired that drinker's face before I drank. Drink only confirmed it. The space for it existed in me.
Marguerite Duras
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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.
Marguerite Duras
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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.
Marguerite Duras
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A book consists of two layers: on top, the readable layer ... and underneath, a layer that was inaccessible. You only sense its existence in a moment of distraction from the literal reading, the way you see childhood through a child. It would take forever to tell what you see, and it would be pointless.
Marguerite Duras
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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.
Marguerite Duras
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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.
Marguerite Duras
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Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.
Marguerite Duras