I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.
Interpretation
This quote compares journalists to laborers, emphasizing the effort they put into their work and the passionate nature of true journalism.
In this quote, Marguerite Duras likens journalists to manual laborers, highlighting the physical and intellectual effort involved in journalism. She suggests that journalism transcends mere reporting and becomes a form of literature only when it is infused with passion, indicating that the heart and soul of journalists contribute significantly to the quality and impact of their writing.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of the press, this quote can be used to illustrate the dedication required for accurate journalism.
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?
No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory.
Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined.
At birth, the child leaves a person - his mother's womb - and this makes him independent of her bodily functions. The baby is next endowed with an urge, or need, to face the out world and to absorb it. We might say that he is born with 'the psychology of world conquest.' By absorbing what he finds about him, he forms his own personality.
No child in Africa, and in fact anywhere in the world, should be denied education.
When I'm working on a book, I try to do eight pages a week. That seems like a good amount. Less than that, I'm not getting a nice momentum, and more than that, I'm probably putting out too much crap.
In the United States we have concentrated tremendous sums of money on the educational plant, seemingly with the idea that the right number of buildings will turn out the right number of graduates. Yet the teachers who actually instruct the future citizens of our country are more often than not miserably paid. If in the future we find ourselves with a lot of fourth-rate citizens, we have only ourselves to blame.
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