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
passion expression blood
Passion such as hers is all consent, asking little in return. I had merely to enter a room where she was to see her face take on that peaceful expression of one who is resting in bed. If I touched her, I had the impression that all the blood in her veins was turning to honey.
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.
games play soul
Of all our games, love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul...
prisoner
Every invalid is a prisoner.
facts deeds deny
A being afire with life cannot foresee death; in fact, by each of his deeds he denies that death exists.
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.
teacher ideas voice
And nevertheless I have loved certain of my masters, and those strangely intimate though elusive relations existing between student and teacher, and the Sirens singing somewhere within the cracked voice of him who is first to reveal a new idea. The greatest seducer was not Alcibiades, afterall, it was Socrates.