Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Done
Written
Wrote
Children
Waiting
Wait
Never
Though
Door
Away
Watching
Thought
Mystery
Stills
Outside
Still
Doors
Possessed
Anything
Loved
Closed

More quotes by Marguerite Duras

Image
Before they're plumbers or writers or taxi drivers or unemployed or journalists, before everything else, men are men. Whether heterosexual or homosexual. The only difference is that some of them remind you of it as soon as you meet them, and others wait for a little while.
Marguerite Duras
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
We, her children, are heroic, dersperate.
Marguerite Duras
Image
Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable.
Marguerite Duras
Image
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
Image
Alcohol doesn't console, it doesn't fill up anyone's psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God.
Marguerite Duras
Image
People come to Paris, to the capital, to give their lives a sense of belonging, of an almost mythical participation in society.
Marguerite Duras
Image
In love there are no vacations. No such thing. Love has to be lived fully with its boredom and all that.
Marguerite Duras
Image
A house means a family house, a place specially meant for putting children and men in so as to restrict their waywardness and distract them from the longing for adventure and escape they've had since time began.
Marguerite Duras
Image
Get rid of things or you'll spend your whole life tidying up.
Marguerite Duras
Image
Words don't change their shape, they change their meaning, their function...They don't have a meaning of their own any more, they refer to other words that you don't know, that you've never read or heard...you've never seen their shape, but you feel...you suspect...they correspond to...an empty space inside you...or in the universe.
Marguerite Duras
Image
I acquired that drinker's face before I drank. Drink only confirmed it. The space for it existed in me.
Marguerite Duras
Image
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
Image
Even so you have managed to live that love in the only way possible for you. Losing it before it happened.
Marguerite Duras
Image
Very early in my life it was too late.
Marguerite Duras
Image
War is a generality, so are the inevitabilities of war, including death.
Marguerite Duras
Image
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
Image
Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.
Marguerite Duras