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

More quotes by Marguerite Duras

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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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In love there are no vacations. No such thing. Love has to be lived fully with its boredom and all that.
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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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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
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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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Get rid of things or you'll spend your whole life tidying up.
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.
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It’s not that you have to achieve anything, it’s that you have to get away from where you are.
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.
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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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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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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.
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.
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Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.
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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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.
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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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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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Alcohol is barren. The words a man speaks in the night of drunkenness fade like the darkness itself at the coming of day.
Marguerite Duras
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Life is only lived full-time by women with children.
Marguerite Duras