Quote

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

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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
Change
Meaning
Correspond
Feel
Inside
Refer
Feels
Seen
Suspect
Never
Heard
Suspects
Space
Shape
Read
Shapes
Universe
Function
Words
Empty

More quotes by 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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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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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
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When a woman drinks it's as if an animal were drinking, or a child. Alcoholism is scandalous in a woman, and a female alcoholic is rare, a serious matter. It's a slur on the divine in our nature.
Marguerite Duras
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You alone became the outer surface of my life, the side I never see, and you will be that, the unknown part of me, until I die.
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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War is a generality, so are the inevitabilities of war, including death.
Marguerite Duras
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One must talk. That's how it is. One must.
Marguerite Duras
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The thing that's between us is fascination, and the fascination resides in our being alike. Whether you're a man or a woman, the fascination resides in finding out that we're alike.
Marguerite Duras
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Nowhere is one more alone than in Paris ... and yet surrounded by crowds. Nowhere is one more likely to incur greater ridicule. And no visit is more essential.
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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You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they're simply unbearable.
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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Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.
Marguerite Duras
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I suddenly remember something I've been told about fear. That amid a hail of machine gun fire you notice the existence of your skin.
Marguerite Duras
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Alcohol doesn't console, it doesn't fill up anyone's psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God.
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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I don't have general views about anything, except social injustice.
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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She represents the un-vowed aspiration of the male human being, his potential infidelity - and infidelity of a very special kind, which would lead him to the opposite of his wife, to the woman of wax whom he could model at will, make and unmake in any way he wished, even unto death.
Marguerite Duras