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Our true birthplace is that in which we cast for the first time an intelligent eye on ourselves. My first homelands were my books.

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
Intelligent
Books
Eye
True
Homelands
Firsts
Birthplace
Book
Homeland
First
Cast
Time
Casts

More quotes by Marguerite Yourcenar

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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.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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Every invalid is a prisoner.
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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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This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?
Marguerite Yourcenar
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I am not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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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.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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Of all our games, love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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No one understands eternity. One simply recognizes its existence.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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The landscape of my days appears to be composed, like mountainous regions, of varied materials heaped up pell-mell. There I see my nature, itself composite, made up of equal parts of instinct and training. Here and there protrude the granite peaks of the inevitable, but all about is rubble from the landslips of chance.
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Want of passion is, I think, a very striking characteristic of Americans, not unrelated to their predilection for violence. For very few people truly have a passionate desire to achieve, and violence serves as a kind of substitute.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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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.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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This morning it occurred to me for the first time that my body, my faithful companion and friend, truer and better known to me than my own soul, may be after all only a sly beast who will end by devouring his master.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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age means nothing. If anything I feel that I'm still a child: eternity and childhood are my ages.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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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.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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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.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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Translating is writing.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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Love is a punishment. We are punished for not having been strong enough to remain alone.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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A being afire with life cannot foresee death in fact, by each of his deeds he denies that death exists.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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Every hour has its immediate duty, its special injunction which dominates all others.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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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.
Marguerite Yourcenar