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Get rid of things or you'll spend your whole life tidying 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
Novelist
Philosopher
Playwright
Poet Lawyer
Publisher
Screenwriter
Writer
Gia Định Province
Marguerite Donnadieu
Marguerite Germaine Marie Donnadieu
Life
Tidying
Spend
Whole
Things

More quotes by Marguerite Duras

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I know all one can know when one knows nothing.
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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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
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
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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.
Marguerite Duras
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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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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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In homosexual love the passion is homosexuality itself. What a homosexual loves, as if it were his lover, his country, his art, his land, is homosexuality.
Marguerite Duras
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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
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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
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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
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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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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
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No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book or painting can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation.
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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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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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
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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
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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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War is a generality, so are the inevitabilities of war, including death.
Marguerite Duras