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
men civilization generations
Ancient and oriental civilizations were more sensitive than we are to the cycles of things; to the succession of generations, both divine and human; and to change within stasis. Western man is virtually alone in wanting to make his God into a fortress and personal immortality into a bulwark against time.
morning soul faithful
This morning it occurred to me for the first time that my body, my faithful companion and friend, truer and better known to me than my own soul, may be after all only a sly beast who will end by devouring his master.
children mean childhood
age means nothing. If anything I feel that I'm still a child: eternity and childhood are my ages.
music art way
In the evenings the art of building gave way to that of music, which is architecture, too, though invisible.
art errors stupidity
All happiness is a work of art: the smallest error falsifies it, the slightest hesitation alters it, the least heaviness spoils it, the slightest stupidity brutalizes it.
mean men law
Since man, fragment of the universe, is governed by the same laws that preside over the heavens, it is by no means absurd to search there above for the themes of our lives, for those frigid sympathies that participate in our achievements as well as our blunderings.
book school degrees
The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.
desire watches may
The technique of a great seducer requires a facility and an indifference in passing from one object of affection to another which I could never have; however that may be, my loves have left me more often than I have left them, for I have never been able to understand how one could have enough of any beloved. The desire to count up exactly the riches which each new love brings us, and to see it change, and perhaps watch it grow old, accords ill with multiplicity of conquests.
strong love-is punishment
Love is a punishment. We are punished for not having been strong enough to remain alone.
spiritual journey earth
To stay in one place and watch the seasons come and go is tanatmount to constant travel: One is traveling with the earth.
thinking destiny insanity
A touch of madness is, I think, almost always necessary for constructing a destiny.
wisdom faces routine
I knew that good like bad becomes a routine, that the temporary tends to endure, that what is external permeates to the inside, and that the mask, given time, comes to be the face itself.
voice appreciate taught
The written word has taught me to listen to the human voice, much as the great unchanging statues have taught me to appreciate bodily motions.
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.