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Books are not life, only its ashes.
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
Books
Book
Life
Ashes
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
The world is big … May it please the One who perchance is to expand the human heart to life's full measure.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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
A touch of madness is, I think, almost always necessary for constructing a destiny.
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
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
Translating is writing.
Marguerite Yourcenar
All happiness is a form of innocence.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Everything is too far away in the past, or mysteriously too close.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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
Any truth creates a scandal.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Every invalid is a prisoner.
Marguerite Yourcenar
The mask, given time, comes to be the face itself
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
Every hour has its immediate duty, its special injunction which dominates all others.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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.
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
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.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Cruelty is the luxury of those who have nothing to do, like drugs or racing stables.
Marguerite Yourcenar
