Marguerite Duras Quotes - Page 4

Frigidity is desire imagined by a woman who doesnt desire the man offering himself to her. Its the desire of a woman for a man who hasnt yet come to her, whom she doesnt yet know. Shes faithful to this stranger even before she belongs to him. Frigidity is the non-desire for whatever is not him.

There are many women who write as they think they should write - to imitate men and make a place for themselves in literature.

People come to Paris, to the capital, to give their lives a sense of belonging, of an almost mythical participation in society.

Alcohol is barren. The words a man speaks in the night of drunkenness fade like the darkness itself at the coming of day.

A house means a family house, a place specially meant for putting children and men in so as to restrict their waywardness and distract them from the longing for adventure and escape they've had since time began.

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

She represents the un-vowed aspiration of the male human being, his potential infidelity - and infidelity of a very special kind, which would lead him to the opposite of his wife, to the woman of wax whom he could model at will, make and unmake in any way he wished, even unto death.

Before they're plumbers or writers or taxi drivers or unemployed or journalists, before everything else, men are men. Whether heterosexual or homosexual. The only difference is that some of them remind you of it as soon as you meet them, and others wait for a little while.

Some people are like that - closed - they can't learn from anyone. Us, for example, we can't learn anything, neither I from you nor you from me, nor from anyone, nor from anything, nor from what happens.

She says people ought to learn to live like them, with the body abandoned in a wilderness, and in the mind the memory of a single kiss, a single word, a single look to stand for a whole love.

No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book or painting can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation.

Their voices reach out into the empty yard, plunge deep into the hills, go right through the heart.

The outrage was on the scale of God. My younger brother was immortal and they hadn't noticed. Immortality had been concealed in my brother's body while he was alive, and we hadn't noticed that it dwelt there. Now my brother's body was dead, and immortality with it. ... And the error, the outrage, filled the whole universe.

Stormy skies, says Ernesto. He grieved for them. Summer rain. Childhood.

I acquired that drinker's face before I drank. Drink only confirmed it. The space for it existed in me.

We, her children, are heroic, dersperate.