Quotes by Marguerite Duras

“Its afterwards you realize that the feeling of happiness you had with a man didnt necessarily prove that you loved him”

“I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhood and in all the lives that follow them, the mother represents madness. Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people weve ever met.”

“It was the men I deceived the most that I loved the most.”

“Frigidity is desire imagined by a woman who doesnt desire the man offering himself to her. Its the desire of a woman for a man who hasnt yet come to her, whom she doesnt yet know. Shes faithful to this stranger even before she belongs to him. Frigidity is the non-desire for whatever is not him.”

“Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. Its absolutely unavoidable. A journalist is someone who looks at the world and the way it works, someone who takes a close look at things every day and reports what she sees, someone who represents the world, the event, for others. She cannot do her work without judging what she sees.”

“You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise theyre simply unbearable.”

“Before theyre plumbers or writers or taxi drivers or unemployed or journalists, before everything else, men are men. Whether heterosexual or homosexual. The only difference is that some of them remind you of it as soon as you meet them, and others wait for a little while.”

“Alcohol doesnt console, it doesnt fill up anyones psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God. It doesnt 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.”

“The woman is the home. Thats where she used to be, and thats where she still is. You might ask me, What if a man tries to be part of the home - will the woman let him? I answer yes. Because then he becomes one of the children.”

“The house a woman creates is a Utopia. She cant help it - cant help trying to interest her nearest and dearest not in happiness itself but in the search for it.”

You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise theyre simply unbearable.

Don’t be afraid anymore. Not of anyone. Not of anything. Nothing. Ever again. Listen to me: not ever again.

The woman is the home. Thats where she used to be, and thats where she still is. You might ask me, What if a man tries to be part of the home -- will the woman let him? I answer yes. Because the he becomes one of the children.

I know its not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction of costliness of their finery. I know the problem lies elsewhere. I dont know where. I only know it isnt where women think.

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

I feel a sadness I expected and which comes only from myself. I say I’ve always been sad. That I can see the same sadness in photos of myself when I was small. That today, recognizing it as the sadness I’ve always had, I could almost call it by my own name, it’s so like me.

Writing was the only thing that populated my life and made it magic.

You think of outside your room, of the streets of the town, the lonely little squares over by the station, of those winter Saturdays all alike.

I often think of the image only I can see now, and of which I’ve never spoken. It’s always there, in the same silence, amazing. It’s the only image of myself I like, the only one in which I recognize myself, in which I delight

You didnt have to attract desire. Either it was in the woman who aroused it or it didnt exist. Either it was there at first glance or else it had never been.