Marguerite Duras Quotes

A collection of quotes by Marguerite Duras.

Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) was a prominent French novelist, playwright, and filmmaker. Born in French Indochina (present-day Vietnam), she spent her formative years in Saigon. Duras moved to Paris in 1931, where she obtained a law degree and became involved in left-wing politics. During World War II, she worked for the French Resistance and later joined the Communist Party.

Duras gained literary recognition with her first novel, "Les Impudents" (1943), but her breakthrough came in 1950 with "The Sea Wall" (known as "Un barrage contre le Pacifique" in French), which drew on her experiences growing up in Indochina. She continued to explore themes of colonialism, love, and the complexities of human relationships in her subsequent works, such as "The Lover" (1984) and "Practicalities" (1990).

Alongside her prolific writing career, Duras also ventured into filmmaking. She wrote and directed several films, including "Hiroshima mon amour" (1959) and "India Song" (1975), both of which garnered critical acclaim.

Duras's unique style blended autobiography, fiction, and fragmented narratives, often blurring the boundaries between reality and imagination. Her works were known for their intensity, poetic language, and exploration of deep emotional states. Over her lifetime, Duras made a significant contribution to French literature and cinema, earning numerous awards and recognition for her artistic achievements.

The house a woman creates is a Utopia. She can't help it - c

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.

Marguerite Duras

I know it's not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwi

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.

Marguerite Duras

Beauty Ugliness

Men like women who write. Even though they don't say so. A w

Men like women who write. Even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country.

Marguerite Duras

She represents the un-vowed aspiration of the male human bei

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.

Marguerite Duras

The woman is the home. That's where she used to be, and that

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 then he becomes one of the children.

Marguerite Duras

Before they're plumbers or writers or taxi drivers or unempl

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.

Marguerite Duras

It's only women who are not really quite women at all, frivo

It's only women who are not really quite women at all, frivolous women who have no idea, who neglect repairs.

Marguerite Duras

For that's what a woman, a mother wants -- to teach her chil

For that's what a woman, a mother wants -- to teach her children to take an interest in life. She knows it's safer for them to be interested in other people's happiness than to believe in their own.

Marguerite Duras

Acting doesn't bring anything to a text. On the contrary, it

Acting doesn't bring anything to a text. On the contrary, it detracts from it.

Marguerite Duras

The thing that's between us is fascination, and the fascinat

The thing that's between us is fascination, and the fascination resides in our being alike. Whether you're a man or a woman, the fascination resides in finding out that we're alike.

Marguerite Duras

I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhood an

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

Marguerite Duras

To love one child and to love all children, whether living o

To love one child and to love all children, whether living or dead --somewhere these two loves come together. To love a no-good but humble punk and to love an honest man who believes himself to be an honest man --somewhere these, too, come together.

Marguerite Duras

It's afterwards you realize that the feeling of happiness yo

It's afterwards you realize that the feeling of happiness you had with a man didn't necessarily prove that you loved him.

Marguerite Duras

A house means a family house, a place specially meant for pu

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.

Marguerite Duras

Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every jou

Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable. A journalist is someone who looks at the world and the way it works, someone who takes a close look at things every day and reports what she sees, someone who represents the world, the event, for others. She cannot do her work without judging what she sees.

Marguerite Duras

I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the

I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.

Marguerite Duras

You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have t

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.

Marguerite Duras

When a woman drinks it's as if an animal were drinking, or a

When a woman drinks it's as if an animal were drinking, or a child. Alcoholism is scandalous in a woman, and a female alcoholic is rare, a serious matter. It's a slur on the divine in our nature.

Marguerite Duras

Alcohol/alcoholism

No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book or pa

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.

Marguerite Duras

Alcohol/alcoholism

Frigidity is desire imagined by a woman who doesn't desire t

Frigidity is desire imagined by a woman who doesn't desire the man offering himself to her. It's the desire of a woman for a man who hasn't yet come to her, whom she doesn't yet know. She's faithful to this stranger even before she belongs to him. Frigidity is the non-desire for whatever is not him.

Marguerite Duras