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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
Necessarily
Discovery
Poetry
Sure
Love
Exquisite

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The mask, given time, comes to be the face itself
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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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Morals are a matter of private agreement decency is of public concern.
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A touch of madness is, I think, almost always necessary for constructing a destiny.
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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.
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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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A being afire with life cannot foresee death in fact, by each of his deeds he denies that death exists.
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Books are not life, only its ashes.
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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.
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Love is a punishment. We are punished for not having been strong enough to remain alone.
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It is not difficult to nourish admirable thoughts when the stars are present.
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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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This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?
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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.
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Any truth creates a scandal.
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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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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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All happiness is a form of innocence.
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Everything turns out to be valuable that one does for one’s self without thought of profit.
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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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