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
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.
truth lying order
I have never seasoned a truth with the sauce of a lie in order to digest it more easily
memories lying grief
The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish. Any lasting grief is reproof to their neglect.
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.
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.
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.