Quote

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

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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
Even
Offering
Men
Belongs
Faithful
Stranger
Whatever
Woman
Frigidity
Desire
Shes
Come
Imagined

More quotes by Marguerite Duras

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War is a generality, so are the inevitabilities of war, including death.
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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.
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We, her children, are heroic, dersperate.
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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.
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All that remains of that minute is time in all its purity, bone-white time.
Marguerite Duras
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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.
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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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Even so you have managed to live that love in the only way possible for you. Losing it before it happened.
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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Madness is like intelligence, you know. You can't explain it. Just like intelligence. It comes on you, it fills you, and then you understand it. But when it goes away you can't understand it at all any longer.
Marguerite Duras
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In love there are no vacations. No such thing. Love has to be lived fully with its boredom and all that.
Marguerite Duras
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It’s not that you have to achieve anything, it’s that you have to get away from where you are.
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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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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Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable.
Marguerite Duras
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A prolonged silence ensues. The reason for the silence is our growing interest one for the other. No one is aware of it, no one yet no one? am I quite sure?
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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I often think of the image only I can see now, and of which I’ve never spoken. It’s always there, in the same silence, amazing. It’s the only image of myself I like, the only one in which I recognize myself, in which I delight
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People come to Paris, to the capital, to give their lives a sense of belonging, of an almost mythical participation in society.
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