Marguerite Duras
Marguerite Duras
Marguerite Donnadieu, known as Marguerite Duras, was a French novelist, playwright, scriptwriter, essayist and experimental filmmaker. She is best known for writing the 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour, which earned her a nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards...
years cities paris
Paradoxically, the freedom of Paris is associated with a persistent belief that nothing ever changes. Paris, they say, is the city that changes least. After an absence of twenty or thirty years, one still recognizes it.
writing solitude drained
The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write.
drinking mind able
What stops you killing yourself when you're intoxicated out of your mind is the thought that once you're dead you won't be able to drink any more.
past imagination breaths
When the past is recaptured by the imagination, breath is put back into life.
memories long body
The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken.
knows
I know all one can know when one knows nothing.
mother believe people
I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhoods and in all the lives that follow them, the mother represents madness. Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.
children drinking animal
When a woman drinks it's as if an animal were drinking, or a child. Alcoholism is scandalous in a woman, and a female alcoholic is rare, a serious matter. It's a slur on the divine in our nature.
beautiful thinking years
I've known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you're more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.
country art passion
In homosexual love the passion is homosexuality itself. What a homosexual loves, as if it were his lover, his country, his art, his land, is homosexuality.
space shapes empty
Words don't change their shape, they change their meaning, their function...They don't have a meaning of their own any more, they refer to other words that you don't know, that you've never read or heard...you've never seen their shape, but you feel...you suspect...they correspond to...an empty space inside you...or in the universe...
years waiting might
She had lived her early years as though she were waiting for something she might, but never did, become.
love men feelings
It's afterwards you realize that the feeling of happiness you had with a man didn't necessarily prove that you loved him.
country writing men
Men like women who write. Even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country.