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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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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
Greater
Visit
Nowhere
Paris
Crowds
Likely
Essential
Incur
Essentials
Ridicule
Alone
Surrounded

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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War is a generality, so are the inevitabilities of war, including death.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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One must talk. That's how it is. One must.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I know all one can know when one knows nothing.
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Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable.
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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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He says he’s lonely, horribly lonely because of this love he feels for her. She says she’s lonely too. She doesn’t say why.
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All that remains of that minute is time in all its purity, bone-white time.
Marguerite Duras