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.
Interpretation
Writing can help us to forget and replace painful memories with new narratives.
In this quote, Marguerite Duras reflects on the power of writing as a means of processing and transforming past experiences. She suggests that when thoughts and emotions are captured in words, they lose their capacity to hurt us in the same way, as writing allows for a reimagining of our stories and a form of emotional catharsis.
In practice
In a workshop on creative writing, this quote can be used to inspire participants to explore their personal experiences.
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 Iβm 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 Iβll 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 created thing is never invented and it is never true: it is always and ever itself.
Most writers - poets in especial - prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy - an ecstatic intuition - and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes.
Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life.
It's always thrilling to encounter the sweep of time in a work of fiction in a way that feels authentic and real.
There are so many different narrative traditions across the world, and each of those traditions has evolved dramatically over time. Once I understood that, I felt truly free; I could write and invent the way I wanted to because there never has been only one way to tell a good story.
If typography is calling attention to itself, it's taking that attention away from what the words are saying.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.