Marguerite Duras

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.

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

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

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.

Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.

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.

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.

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.

The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken.