"He wanted to pay her; he thought women ought to be paid for keeping men from dying or going out of their minds."
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Quote collection
Marguerite Duras quotes (page 3 of 5)
91 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Drinking isn't necessarily the same as wanting to die. But you can't drink without thinking you're killing yourself."
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"I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhoods and in all the lives that follow them, the mother represents madness. Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met."
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"I know all one can know when one knows nothing."
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"In heterosexual love there's no solution. Man and woman are irreconcilable, and it's the doomed attempt to do the impossible, repeated in each new affair, that lends heterosexual love its grandeur."
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"What stops you killing yourself when you're intoxicated out of your mind is the thought that once you're dead you won't be able to drink any more."
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"Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable."
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"Paradoxically, the freedom of Paris is associated with a persistent belief that nothing ever changes. Paris, they say, is the city that changes least. After an absence of twenty or thirty years, one still recognizes it."
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"Perhaps someone will have seen mine, the one I’m waiting for, just as I saw him, in a ditch when his hands were making their last appeal and his eyes no longer could see. Someone who will never know what that man was to me; someone whose name I’ll never know."
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"When you wept it was just over yourself and not because of the marvelous impossibility of reaching her through the difference that separates you."
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"Even so you have managed to live that love in the only way possible for you. Losing it before it happened."
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"No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book or painting can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation."
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"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."
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"When a woman drinks it's as if an animal were drinking, or a child. Alcoholism is scandalous in a woman, and a female alcoholic is rare, a serious matter. It's a slur on the divine in our nature."
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"The house a woman creates is a Utopia. She can't help it - can't help trying to interest her nearest and dearest not in happiness itself but in the search for it."
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"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."
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"I suddenly remember something I've been told about fear. That amid a hail of machine gun fire you notice the existence of your skin."
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"It has been my face. It's got older still, or course, but less, comparatively, than it would otherwise have done. It's scored with deep, dry wrinkles, the skin is cracked. But my face hasn't collapsed, as some with fine feature have done. It's kept the same contours, but its substance has been laid waste. I have a face laid waste."
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"...as long as nothing happens between them, the memory is cursed with what hasn't happened."
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"I am dead. I have no desire for you. My body no longer wants the one who doesn’t love."
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