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This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?
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
Bed
City
Cities
Dream
Murderers
Ghosts
Murderer
Belongs
Ghost
More quotes by Marguerite Yourcenar
I have never seasoned a truth with the sauce of a lie in order to digest it more easily
Marguerite Yourcenar
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.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Do not mistake me. I am not yet weak enough to yield to fearful imaginings, which are almost as absurd as illusions of hope, and are certainly harder to bear. If I must deceive myself, I should prefer to stay on the side of confidence, for I shall lose no more there and shall suffer less.
Marguerite Yourcenar
All happiness is a form of innocence.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Everything that we do affects our fate for better or for worse. The circumstances into which we are born also exert a tremendous influence we come into the world with debits and credits for which we are not responsible already posted to our account: this teaches us humility.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Our great mistake is to try to exact from each person virtues which he does not possess, and to neglect the cultivation of those which he has.
Marguerite Yourcenar
If you love life you also love the past, because it is the present as it has survived in memory. Translation by David Downie
Marguerite Yourcenar
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.
Marguerite Yourcenar
No one understands eternity. One simply recognizes its existence.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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.
Marguerite Yourcenar
age means nothing. If anything I feel that I'm still a child: eternity and childhood are my ages.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Love is a punishment. We are punished for not having been strong enough to remain alone.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Everything turns out to be valuable that one does for one’s self without thought of profit.
Marguerite Yourcenar
A being afire with life cannot foresee death in fact, by each of his deeds he denies that death exists.
Marguerite Yourcenar
The world is big … May it please the One who perchance is to expand the human heart to life's full measure.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Translating is writing.
Marguerite Yourcenar
I am not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Books are not life, only its ashes.
Marguerite Yourcenar
The mask, given time, comes to be the face itself
Marguerite Yourcenar