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The mask, given time, comes to be the face itself

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
Faces
Comes
Inspirational
Given
Time
Mask
Face

More quotes by Marguerite Yourcenar

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Morals are a matter of private agreement decency is of public concern.
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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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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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Any truth creates a scandal.
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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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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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Translating is writing.
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If you love life you also love the past, because it is the present as it has survived in memory. Translation by David Downie
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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 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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I am not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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age means nothing. If anything I feel that I'm still a child: eternity and childhood are my ages.
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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.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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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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No one understands eternity. One simply recognizes its existence.
Marguerite Yourcenar