Marguerite Duras

Alcohol doesn't console, it doesn't fill up anyone's psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God. It doesn't comfort man. On the contrary, it encourages him in his folly, it transports him to the supreme regions where he is master of his own destiny.

What she said was always strange. It had happened long ago. It seemed insignificant. And yet it was something you remembered forever. The words as well as the story. The voice as much as the words.

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.

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.

Stormy skies, says Ernesto. He grieved for them. Summer rain. Childhood.

A prolonged silence ensues. The reason for the silence is our growing interest one for the other. No one is aware of it, no one yet; no one? am I quite sure?

A house means a family house, a place specially meant for putting children and men in so as to restrict their waywardness and distract them from the longing for adventure and escape they've had since time began.

Frigidity is desire imagined by a woman who doesnt desire the man offering himself to her. Its the desire of a woman for a man who hasnt yet come to her, whom she doesnt yet know. Shes faithful to this stranger even before she belongs to him. Frigidity is the non-desire for whatever is not him.

I am dead. I have no desire for you. My body no longer wants the one who doesn’t love.

The thing that's between us is fascination, and the fascination resides in our being alike. Whether you're a man or a woman, the fascination resides in finding out that we're alike.

...as long as nothing happens between them, the memory is cursed with what hasn't happened.

When you wept it was just over yourself and not because of the marvelous impossibility of reaching her through the difference that separates you.

To love one child and to love all children, whether living or dead -somewhere these two loves come together. To love a no-good but humble punk and to love an honest man who believes himself to be an honest man -somewhere these, too, come together.

Words don't change their shape, they change their meaning, their function...They don't have a meaning of their own any more, they refer to other words that you don't know, that you've never read or heard...you've never seen their shape, but you feel...you suspect...they correspond to...an empty space inside you...or in the universe.

She had lived her early years as though she were waiting for something she might, but never did, become.

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.

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.

I often think of the image only I can see now, and of which I’ve never spoken. It’s always there, in the same silence, amazing. It’s the only image of myself I like, the only one in which I recognize myself, in which I delight

Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable.

Alcohol is barren. The words a man speaks in the night of drunkenness fade like the darkness itself at the coming of day.

Alcohol doesn't console, it doesn't fill up anyone's psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God.