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I seldom read on beaches or in gardens. You can't read by two lights at once, the light of day and the light of the book. You should read by electric light, the room in shadow, and only the page lit up.
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
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Philosopher
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Writer
Gia Định Province
Marguerite Donnadieu
Marguerite Germaine Marie Donnadieu
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Two
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More quotes by Marguerite Duras
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
Drinking isn't necessarily the same as wanting to die. But you can't drink without thinking you're killing yourself.
Marguerite Duras
I acquired that drinker's face before I drank. Drink only confirmed it. The space for it existed in me.
Marguerite Duras
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
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
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
It's only women who are not really quite women at all, frivolous women who have no idea, who neglect repairs.
Marguerite Duras
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
Life is only lived full-time by women with children.
Marguerite Duras
I don't have general views about anything, except social injustice.
Marguerite Duras
The best way to fill time is to waste it.
Marguerite Duras
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
Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable.
Marguerite Duras
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
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
Frigidity is desire imagined by a woman who doesnt desire the man offering himself to her. Its the desire of a woman for a man who hasnt yet come to her, whom she doesnt yet know. Shes faithful to this stranger even before she belongs to him. Frigidity is the non-desire for whatever is not him.
Marguerite Duras
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
Get rid of things or you'll spend your whole life tidying up.
Marguerite Duras
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
One must talk. That's how it is. One must.
Marguerite Duras