Marguerite Duras > Quotes

“Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.”
― Marguerite Duras

“Very early in my life it was too late.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Lover

“...as long as nothing happens between them, the memory is cursed with what hasn't happened.”
― Marguerite Duras, Blue Eyes, Black Hair

“I think about you. But I don't say it anymore.”
― Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon amour

“You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they're simply unbearable.”
― Marguerite Duras, Practicalities

“Suddenly, all at once, she knows, knows that he doesn't understand her, that he never will, that he lacks the power to understand such perverseness. And that he can never move fast enough to catch her.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Lover

“I meet you. I remember you. Who are you? You’re destroying me. You’re good for me. How could I know this city was tailor-made for love? How could I know you fit my body like a glove? I like you. How unlikely. I like you. How slow all of a sudden. How sweet. You cannot know. You’re destroying me. You’re good for me. You’re destroying me. You’re good for me. I have time. Please, devour me. Deform me to the point of ugliness. Why not you? Why not you in this city and in this night, so like other cities and other nights you can hardly tell the difference? I beg of you.”
― Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon amour

“I've known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you're more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Lover

“It’s not that you have to achieve anything, it’s that you have to get away from where you are.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Lover

“When it's in a book I don't think it'll hurt any more ...exist any more. One of the things writing does is wipe things out. Replace them.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Lover

“That she had so completely recovered her sanity was a source of sadness to her. One should never be cured of one's passion.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Ravishing of Lol Stein

“He says he’s lonely, horribly lonely because of this love he feels for her. She says she’s lonely too. She doesn’t say why.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Lover

“Years after the war, after marriages, children, divorces, books, he came to Paris with his wife. He phoned her. It's me. She recognized him at once from the voice. He said, I just wanted to hear your voice. She said, it's me, hello. He was nervous, afraid, as before. His voice suddenly trembled. And with the trembling, suddenly, she heard again the voice of China. He knew she'd begun writing books, he'd heard about it through her mother whom he'd met again in Saigon. And about her younger brother, and he'd been grieved for her. Then he didn't know what to say. And then he told her. Told her that it was as before, that he still loved her, he could never stop loving her, that he'd love her until death.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Lover

“She had lived her early years as though she were waiting for something she might, but never did, become.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Ravishing of Lol Stein

“Very early in my life it was too late. It was already too late when I was eighteen. Between eighteen and twenty-five my face took off in a new direction. I grew old at eighteen. I don't know if it's the same for everyone, I've never asked. But I believe I've heard of the way time can suddenly accelerate on people when they're going through even the most youthful and highly esteemed stages of life. My ageing was very sudden. I saw it spread over my features one by one, changing the relationship between them, making the eyes larger, the expression sadder, the mouth more final, leaving great creases in the forehead. But instead of being dismayed I watched this process with the same sort of interest I might have taken in the reading of a book.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Lover

“I know it's not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction of costliness of their finery. I know the problem lies elsewhere. I don't know where. I only know it isn't where women think.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Lover

“The woman is the home. That's where she used to be, and that's where she still is. You might ask me, What if a man tries to be part of the home -- will the woman let him? I answer yes. Because the he becomes one of the children.”
― Marguerite Duras

“I am dead. I have no desire for you. My body no longer wants the one who doesn’t love.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Lover

“I've forgotten the words with which to tell you. I knew them once, but I've forgotten them, and now I'm talking to you without them.”
― Marguerite Duras, Emily L.

“Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book. Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome.”
― Marguerite Duras, Writing

“I feel a sadness I expected and which comes only from myself. I say I’ve always been sad. That I can see the same sadness in photos of myself when I was small. That today, recognizing it as the sadness I’ve always had, I could almost call it by my own name, it’s so like me.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Lover

“You alone became the outer surface of my life, the side I never see, and you will be that, the unknown part of me, until I die.”
― Marguerite Duras, Emily L.

“I'm still there, watching those possessed children, as far away from the mystery now as I was then. I've never written, though I thought I wrote, never loved, though I thought I loved, never done anything but wait outside the closed door.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Lover

“The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken.”
― Marguerite Duras, Summer Rain

“She says people ought to learn to live like them, with the body abandoned in a wilderness, and in the mind the memory of a single kiss, a single word, a single look to stand for a whole love.”
― Marguerite Duras, Blue Eyes, Black Hair

“The story of my life doesn’t exist. Does not exist. There’s never any center to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Lover

“Fidelity, enforced and unto death, is the price you pay for the kind of love you never want to give up, for someone you want to hold forever, tighter and tighter, whether he's close or far away, someone who becomes dearer to you the more you've sacrificed for his sake. ”
― Marguerite Duras

“The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write.”
― Marguerite Duras, Writing

“When the past is recaptured by the imagination, breath is put back into life.”
― Marguerite Duras

“Among all the other nights upon nights, the girl had spent that one on the boat….when it happened, the burst of Chopin…. There wasn’t a breath of wind and the music spread all over the dark boat, like a heavenly injunction whose import was unknown, like an order from God whose meaning was inscrutable. And the girl started up as if to go and kill herself in her turn, throw herself in her turn into the sea, and afterwards, she wept because she thought of the man from Cholon and suddenly she wasn’t sure she hadn’t loved him with a love she hadn’t seen because it had lost itself in the affair like water in the sand and she rediscovered it only now, through this moment of music.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Lover