“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.”
Marguerite Duras, The Lover“He says he’s lonely, horribly lonely because of this love he feels for her. She says she’s lonely too. She doesn’t say why.”
Marguerite Duras, The Lover“The house a woman creates is a Utopia. She can't help it - can't help trying to interest her nearest and dearest not in happiness itself but in the search for it.”
Marguerite Duras“Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.”
Marguerite Duras“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”
Marguerite Duras“The woman is the home. That's where she used to be, and that's 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.”
Marguerite Duras“You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they're simply unbearable.”
Marguerite Duras“To write,” Marguerite Duras remarked, “is also not to speak. It is to keep silent. It is to howl noiselessly.”
Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice“It's while it's being lived that life is immortal, while it's still alive. Immortality is not a matter of more or less time, its not really a question of immortality but of something else that remains unknown. It's as untrue to say it's without beginning or end as to say it begins and ends with the life of the spirit, since it partakes both of the spirit and of the pursuit of the void.”
Marguerite Duras, The Lover