Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Marguerite Duras (French Novelist, Playwright)

Marguérite Duras (1914–96,) pseudonym of Marguérite Donnadieu, was a French novelist, scriptwriter, and filmmaker. She is considered one of the most successful and important French literary figures of the 20th century. Her work crosses traditional boundaries of fiction and autobiography.

Born in Gia-Dinh, near Saigon, French Indochina, Duras was the daughter of French parents, both of whom were teachers. When she was seven, her father died of dysentery, leaving the family in financial hardship.

At school, Duras had a brief and intense ill-conceived love affair with an older Chinese man whom she met on a ferryboat. It was purportedly encouraged by her family for financial reasons. She kept the affair secret for the next fifty years but later evoked the experience in her Prix Goncourt prize-winning L’Amant (1984; The Lover, 1985.) It is praised for its lyricism and the raw emotion of the violence and poverty of Duras’s childhood.

Duras studied law and political science at the Sorbonne in Paris, and, during World War II, took part in the Resistance at great risk to herself as a Jewess. Her novels include Un barrage contre le Pacifique (1950; The Sea Wall, 1952,) Le Marin de Gibraltar (1952; The Sailor from Gibraltar, 1966,) Le Vice-Consul (1966; The Vice-Consul, 1968,) Détruire, dit-elle (1969; Destroy, She Said, 1970) and the semi-autobiographical La Douleur (1985; The War, 1986.)

Duras also wrote film scripts such as Hiroshima mon amour (1960, ‘Hiroshima My Love’) and India Song (1976,) and several plays, including La Musica (1965; The Music, 1966.) She also directed numerous films, including Détruire dit elle (1961; Destroy She Said) and the experimental Agatha (1981.)

Dumas struggled with alcoholism for much of her life. In her later life, she survived two years in a coma and continued to write. Her final novel was C’est tout (1995; No More, 2000.)

Notable biographies of Duras include Marilyn R. Schuster’s Marguerite Duras Revisited (1993) and Leslie Hill’s Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires (1993.)

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Marguerite Duras

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
Topics: Women, Men, Men & Women

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
Topics: Sex

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
Topics: Relationships

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.
—Marguerite Duras
Topics: Alcoholism, Alcohol

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
Topics: Love

Alcohol is barren. The words a man speaks in the night of drunkenness fade like the darkness itself at the coming of day.
—Marguerite Duras
Topics: Alcoholism, Alcohol

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
Topics: Mothers

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
Topics: Alcohol, Alcoholism

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
Topics: Love, Happiness

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
Topics: Mothers

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
Topics: Alcohol, Alcoholism

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
Topics: Acting, Actors, Aspirations

Acting doesn’t bring anything to a text. On the contrary, it detracts from it.
—Marguerite Duras
Topics: Acting, Actors

I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.
—Marguerite Duras
Topics: Journalists, Journalism

The best way to fill time is to waste it.
—Marguerite Duras
Topics: Time Management, Time

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
Topics: Men

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
Topics: Men

It was the men I deceived the most that I loved the most.
—Marguerite Duras
Topics: Love

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
Topics: Journalism, Journalists

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
Topics: Home

It’s only women who are not really quite women at all, frivolous women who have no idea, who neglect repairs.
—Marguerite Duras
Topics: Women

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
Topics: Home

Wondering Whom to Read Next?

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *