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
book emotional years
I could say that all my books were conceived by the time I was twenty, although they were not to be written for another thirty or forty years. But perhaps this is true of most writers—the emotional storage is done very early on.
book ashes
Books are not life, only its ashes.
book eye intelligent
Our true birthplace is that in which we cast for the first time an intelligent eye on ourselves. My first homelands were my books.
book age should
There are books which one should not attempt before having passed the age of forty.
beautiful children book
Leaving behind books is even more beautiful — there are far too many children.
book people ancient
One reads thousands of books, of poets, modern and ancient, as one meets thousands of people. What remains of it all is hard to tell.
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.
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.
character two giving
One nourishes one's created characters with one's own substance: it's rather like the process of gestation. To give the character life, or to give him back life, it is of course necessary to fortify him by contributing something of one's own humanity, but it doesn't follow from that that the character is I, the writer, or that I am the character. The two entities remain distinct.
mirrors media people
the press is too often a distorting mirror, which deforms the people and events it represents, making them seem bigger or smaller than they really are.
travel would-be prison
[On travel:] Who would be so besotted as to die without having made at least the round of this, his prison?
thinking might wiser
I think still that someone wiser than I might well have remained happy till his death.
truth scandal
Any truth creates a scandal.
get-well lying cutting
Sickness disgusts us with death, and we wish to get well, which is a way of wishing to live. But weakness and suffering, with manifold bodily woes, soon discourage the invalid from trying to regain ground: he tires of those respites which are but snares, of that faltering strength, those ardors cut short, and that perpetual lying in wait for the next attack.