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

More quotes by Marguerite Duras

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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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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.
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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.
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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 see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.
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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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Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable.
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Very early in my life it was too late.
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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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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.
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Life is only lived full-time by women with children.
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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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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 know all one can know when one knows nothing.
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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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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