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Every invalid is a prisoner.

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
Invalid
Prisoner
Every

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It is not difficult to nourish admirable thoughts when the stars are present.
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All happiness is a form of innocence.
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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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This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?
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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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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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Translating is writing.
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Everything is too far away in the past, or mysteriously too close.
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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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I am not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry.
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Any truth creates a scandal.
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Cruelty is the luxury of those who have nothing to do, like drugs or racing stables.
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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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The mask, given time, comes to be the face itself
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Leaving behind books is even more beautiful — there are far too many children.
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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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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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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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Every hour has its immediate duty, its special injunction which dominates all others.
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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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