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The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.

Marguerite Yourcenar

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Marguerite Yourcenar
Age: 84 †
Born: 1903
Born: June 7
Died: 1987
Died: December 17
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Brussels
Belgium
Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour
Yourcenar
Marguerite Cleenewerck de Crayencour
Marguerite de Crayencour
School
Homeland
Firsts
Schools
Book
Degree
Homelands
Looks
Degrees
Hadrian
First
Oneself
Birthplace
Time
Books
Intelligently
Upon
Wherein
True
Lesser

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I have come to think that great men are characterized precisely by the extreme position which they take, and that their heroism consists in holding to that extremity throughout their lives.
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When two texts, or two assertions, perhaps two ideas, are in contradiction, be ready to reconcile them rather than cancel one by the other regard them as two different facets, or two successive stages, of the same reality, a reality convincingly human just because it is too complex.
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Any truth creates a scandal.
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A being afire with life cannot foresee death in fact, by each of his deeds he denies that death exists.
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Morals are a matter of private agreement decency is of public concern.
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Passion such as hers is all consent, asking little in return. I had merely to enter a room where she was to see her face take on that peaceful expression of one who is resting in bed. If I touched her, I had the impression that all the blood in her veins was turning to honey.
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The world is big … May it please the One who perchance is to expand the human heart to life's full measure.
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Of all our games, love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul.
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I have never seasoned a truth with the sauce of a lie in order to digest it more easily
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Since man, fragment of the universe, is governed by the same laws that preside over the heavens, it is by no means absurd to search there above for the themes of our lives, for those frigid sympathies that participate in our achievements as well as our blunderings.
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Laws change more slowly than custom, and though dangerous when they fall behind the times are more dangerous still when they presume to anticipate custom.
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I could say that all my books were conceived by the time I was twenty, although they were not to be written for another thirty or forty years. But perhaps this is true of most writers—the emotional storage is done very early on.
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The mask, given time, comes to be the face itself
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Writing is a perpetual choice between a thousand expressions, none of which satisfies me, none of which, above all, satisfies me without the others. Yet I ought to know that only music permits a succession of chords.
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the press is too often a distorting mirror, which deforms the people and events it represents, making them seem bigger or smaller than they really are.
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Everything is too far away in the past, or mysteriously too close.
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Ancient and oriental civilizations were more sensitive than we are to the cycles of things to the succession of generations, both divine and human and to change within stasis. Western man is virtually alone in wanting to make his God into a fortress and personal immortality into a bulwark against time.
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I am not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry.
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He had reached that moment in life, different for each one of us, when a man abandonds himself to his demon or to his genius, following a mysterious law which bids him either to destroy or outdo himself.
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This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?
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