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.
Interpretation
A house serves as a space for family and stability, guiding individuals away from their natural desires for adventure.
In this quote, Marguerite Duras reflects on the role of a house as not just a physical structure, but as a nurturing environment meant to contain and shape family life. It suggests that a home provides boundaries that help individuals—especially children—navigate their innate impulses for exploration and adventure, emphasizing the balance between safety and freedom in a familial setting.
In practice
This quote can be used in discussions about the importance of family in shaping one's identity.
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?
As she stood in the darkened room and watched my sister and father, I knew one of things that heaven meant. I had a choice, and it was not to divide my family in my heart.
To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.
The family is the basic cell of government: it is where we are trained to believe that we are human beings or that we are chattel, it is where we are trained to see the sex and race divisions and become callous to injustice even if it is done to ourselves, to accept as biological a full system of authoritarian government.
For many, Christmas is also a time for coming together. But for others, service will come first.
When you smell our candles burning, what does it make you think of, my child?" Winterfell, she might have said. I smell snow and smoke and pine needles. I smell the stables. I smell Hodor laughing, and Jon and Robb battling in the yard, and Sansa singing about some stupid lady fair. I smell the crypts where the stone kings sit. I smell hot bread baking. I smell the godswood. I smell my wolf. I smell her fur, almost as if she were still beside me. "I don't smell anything," she said.
Your children will see what you're all about by what you live rather than what you say.
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