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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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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
Existence
Machine
Fear
Skin
Remember
Skins
Something
Gun
Suddenly
Machines
Amid
Told
Hail
Fire
Notice

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.
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Men like women who write. Even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country.
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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.
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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.
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I acquired that drinker's face before I drank. Drink only confirmed it. The space for it existed in me.
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I don't have general views about anything, except social injustice.
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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.
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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.
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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'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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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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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.
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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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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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Alcohol is barren. The words a man speaks in the night of drunkenness fade like the darkness itself at the coming of day.
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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.
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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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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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There are many women who write as they think they should write - to imitate men and make a place for themselves in literature.
Marguerite Duras
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Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.
Marguerite Duras