Marguerite Duras

Novelist

1914-04-04

Quotes by Marguerite Duras

• I know it's not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction of costliness of their finery. I know the problem lies elsewhere. I don't know where. I only know it isn't where women think.

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• The woman is the home. That's where she used to be, and that's where she still is. You might ask me, What if a man tries to be part of the home -- will the woman let him? I answer yes. Because the he becomes one of the children.

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• Don't be afraid anymore. Not of anyone. Not of anything. Nothing. Ever again. Listen to me: not ever again.

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• I know it's not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction of costliness of their finery. I know the problem lies elsewhere. I don't know where. I only know it isn't where women think.

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• Don't be afraid anymore. Not of anyone. Not of anything. Nothing. Ever again. Listen to me: not ever again.

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• The woman is the home. That's where she used to be, and that's where she still is. You might ask me, What if a man tries to be part of the home -- will the woman let him? I answer yes. Because the he becomes one of the children.

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• I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhoods and in all the lives that follow them, the mother represents madness. Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.

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• Alcohol doesn't console, it doesn't fill up anyone's psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God. It doesn't comfort man. On the contrary, it encourages him in his folly, it transports him to the supreme regions where he is master of his own destiny.

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• Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable.

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• You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they're simply unbearable.

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• The house a woman creates is a Utopia. She can't help it - can't help trying to interest her nearest and dearest not in happiness itself but in the search for it.

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• In love there are no vacations. No such thing. Love has to be lived fully with its boredom and all that.

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• I suddenly remember something I've been told about fear. That amid a hail of machine gun fire you notice the existence of your skin.

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• War is a generality, so are the inevitabilities of war, including death.

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