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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.

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
Passion
Substitute
Desire
Substitutes
Kind
Characteristics
Think
Passionate
Predilection
Thinking
Americans
Unrelated
People
Truly
Striking
Achieve
Characteristic
Violence
Serves

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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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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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Translating is writing.
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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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Love is a punishment. We are punished for not having been strong enough to remain alone.
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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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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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The mask, given time, comes to be the face itself
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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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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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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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He had reached that moment in life, different for each one of us, when a man abandonds himself to his demon or to his genius, following a mysterious law which bids him either to destroy or outdo himself.
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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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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 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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All happiness is a form of innocence.
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Cruelty is the luxury of those who have nothing to do, like drugs or racing stables.
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Any truth creates a scandal.
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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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No one understands eternity. One simply recognizes its existence.
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