Marguerite Yourcenar
Marguerite Yourcenar
Marguerite Yourcenarwas a Belgian-born French novelist and essayist. Winner of the Prix Femina and the Erasmus Prize, she was the first woman elected to the Académie française, in 1980, and the seventeenth person to occupy Seat 3...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 June 1903
CountryUnited States of America
happiness innocence form
All happiness is a form of innocence.
men law genius
He had reached that moment in life, different for each one of us, when a man abandonds himself to his demon or to his genius, following a mysterious law which bids him either to destroy or outdo himself.
stars difficult admirable
It is not difficult to nourish admirable thoughts when the stars are present.
eternity existence
No one understands eternity. One simply recognizes its existence.
luxury drug racing
Cruelty is the luxury of those who have nothing to do, like drugs or racing stables.
ignorance pride cowardice
On the whole, however, it is only out of pride or gross ignorance, or cowardice, that we refuse to see in the present the lineaments of times to come.
past far-away
Everything is too far away in the past, or mysteriously too close.
friendship art believe
I believe that friendship, like love, of which it is a particular kind, requires nearly as much art as a successful choreography.
education children school
The American child, driven to school by bus and stupefied by television, is losing contact with reality. There is an enormous gap between the sheer weight of the textbooks that he carries home from school and his capacity to interpret what is in them.
humility fate credit
Everything that we do affects our fate for better or for worse. The circumstances into which we are born also exert a tremendous influence; we come into the world with debits and credits for which we are not responsible already posted to our account: this teaches us humility.
passion thinking people
Want of passion is, I think, a very striking characteristic of Americans, not unrelated to their predilection for violence. For very few people truly have a passionate desire to achieve, and violence serves as a kind of substitute.
book writing years
There are stages in bread-making quite similar to the stages of writing. You begin with something shapeless, which sticks to your fingers, a kind of paste. Gradually that paste becomes more and more firm. Then there comes a point when it turns rubbery. Finally, you sense that the yeast has begun to do its work: the dough is alive. Then all you have to do is let it rest. But in the case of a book the work may take ten years.
lying book years
A book may lie dormant for fifty years or for two thousand years in a forgotten corner of a library, only to reveal, upon being opened, the marvels or the abysses that it contains, or the line that seems to have been written for me alone. In this respect the writer is not different from any other human being: whatever we say or do can have far-reaching consequences.
our-world hands life-and-death
Every life is punctuated by deaths and departures, and each one causes great suffering that it is better to endure rather than forgo the pleasure of having known the person who has passed away. Somehow our world rebuilds itself after every death, and in any case we know that none of us will last forever. So you might say that life and death lead us by the hand, firmly but tenderly.