Explore Quotes by Marguerite Duras

Heterosexuality is dangerous. It tempts you to aim at a perfect duality of desire.

Life is only lived full-time by women with children.

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.

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

When the past is recaptured by the imagination, breath is put back into life.

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

He wanted to pay her; he thought women ought to be paid for keeping men from dying or going out of their minds.

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.

Very early in my life it was too late.

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.

It's only women who are not really quite women at all, frivolous women who have no idea, who neglect repairs.

I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.

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.

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

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.

Men like women who write. Even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country.

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.

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

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.

The best way to fill time is to waste it.

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.