Quote

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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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
Take
Child
Literal
Children
Reading
Pointless
Way
Moment
Distraction
Would
Sense
Layers
Tell
Consists
Readable
Moments
Childhood
Inaccessible
Two
Existence
Layer
Book
Forever
Underneath

More quotes by 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?
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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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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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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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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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I know all one can know when one knows nothing.
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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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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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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Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.
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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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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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.
Marguerite Duras
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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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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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I don't have general views about anything, except social injustice.
Marguerite Duras
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In a certain state of mind, all trace of feeling is banished. Whenever I remain silent in a certain way, I don't love you, have you noticed that?
Marguerite Duras
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Very early in my life it was too late.
Marguerite Duras
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She says people ought to learn to live like them, with the body abandoned in a wilderness, and in the mind the memory of a single kiss, a single word, a single look to stand for a whole love.
Marguerite Duras
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Get rid of things or you'll spend your whole life tidying up.
Marguerite Duras