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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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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
Discovery
Poetry
Sure
Love
Exquisite
Necessarily

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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.
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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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This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?
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The written word has taught me to listen to the human voice, much as the great unchanging statues have taught me to appreciate bodily motions.
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Cruelty is the luxury of those who have nothing to do, like drugs or racing stables.
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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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Morals are a matter of private agreement decency is of public concern.
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Leaving behind books is even more beautiful — there are far too many children.
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Love is a punishment. We are punished for not having been strong enough to remain alone.
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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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age means nothing. If anything I feel that I'm still a child: eternity and childhood are my ages.
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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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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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A touch of madness is, I think, almost always necessary for constructing a destiny.
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Translating is writing.
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Everything is too far away in the past, or mysteriously too close.
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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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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.
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All happiness is a form of innocence.
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Every hour has its immediate duty, its special injunction which dominates all others.
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