"Very early in my life it was too late."
— Marguerite Duras (The Lover)

"She had lived her early years as though she were waiting for something she might, but never did, become."
— Marguerite Duras (The Ravishing of Lol Stein)

"Life is only lived full-time by women with children."
— Marguerite Duras

"I've known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you're more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged."
— Marguerite Duras (The Lover)

"That she had so completely recovered her sanity was a source of sadness to her. One should never be cured of one's passion."
— Marguerite Duras (The Ravishing of Lol Stein)

"...as long as nothing happens between them, the memory is cursed with what hasn't happened."
— Marguerite Duras (Blue Eyes, Black Hair)

"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

"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."
— Marguerite Duras

"The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write."
— Marguerite Duras (Writing)

"When it's in a book I don't think it'll hurt any more ...exist any more. One of the things writing does is wipe things out. Replace them."
— Marguerite Duras (The Lover)

"When the past is recaptured by the imagination, breath is put back into life."
— Marguerite Duras

"Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met."
— Marguerite Duras

"I've forgotten the words with which to tell you. I knew them once, but I've forgotten them, and now I'm talking to you without them."
— Marguerite Duras (Emily L.)

"Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book. Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome."
— Marguerite Duras (Writing)

"The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken."
— Marguerite Duras (Summer Rain)

"You alone became the outer surface of my life, the side I never see, and you will be that, the unknown part of me, until I die."
— Marguerite Duras (Emily L.)

"What she said was always strange. It had happened long ago. It seemed insignificant. And yet it was something you remembered forever. The words as well as the story. The voice as much as the words."
— Marguerite Duras (Summer Rain)

"Hélène Lagonelle’s body is heavy, innocent still, her skin’s as soft as that of certain fruits, you almost can’t grasp her, she’s almost illusory, it’s too much. She makes you want to kill her, she conjures up a marvelous dream of putting her to death with your own hands. Those flour-white shapes, she bears them unknowingly, and offers them for hands to knead, for lips to eat, without holding them back, without any knowledge of them and without any knowledge of their fabulous power. I’d like to eat Hélène Lagonelle’s breasts as he eats mine in the room in the Chinese town where I go every night to increase my knowledge of God. I’d like to devour and be devoured by those flour-white breasts of hers.
I am worn out with desire for Hélène Lagonelle.
I am worn out with desire.
I want to take Hélène Lagonelle with me to where every evening, my eyes shut, I have imparted to me the pleasure that makes you cry out. I’d like to give Hélène Lagonelle to the man who does that to me, so he may do it in turn to her. I want it to happen in my presence, I want her to do it as I wish, I want her to give herself where I give myself. It’s via Hélène Lagonelle’s body, through it, that the ultimate pleasure would pass from him to me.
A pleasure unto death."
— Marguerite Duras (The Lover)

"It’s not that you have to achieve anything, it’s that you have to get away from where you are."
— Marguerite Duras (The Lover)

"a writer is a foreign country"
— Marguerite Duras

"I can't really remember the days. The light of the sun blurred and annihilated all color. But the nights, I remember them. The blue was more distant than the sky, beyond all depths, covering the bounds of the world. The sky, for me, was the stretch of pure brilliance crossing the blue, that cold coalescence beyond all color. Sometimes, it was in Vinh Long, when my mother was sad she'd order the gig and we'd drive out into the country to see the nighta s it was in the dry season. I had that good fortune- those nights, that mother. The light fell from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency, in torrents of silence and immobility. The air was blue, you could hold it in your hand. Blue. The sky was the continual throbbing of the brilliance of the light. The night lit up everything, all the country on either bank of the river as far as the eye could reach. Every night was different, each one had a name as long as it lasted. Their sound was that of the dogs, the country dogs baying at mystery. They answered on another from village to village, until the time and space of the night were utterly consumed."
— Marguerite Duras (The Lover)

"Fidelity, enforced and unto death, is the price you pay for the kind of love you never want to give up, for someone you want to hold forever, tighter and tighter, whether he's close or far away, someone who becomes dearer to you the more you've sacrificed for his sake. "
— Marguerite Duras

"We’re in the vanguard of a nameless battle, a battle without arms or bloodshed or glory: we’re in the vanguard of waiting."
— Marguerite Duras

"Perhaps someone will have seen mine, the one I’m waiting for, just as I saw him, in a ditch when his hands were making their last appeal and his eyes no longer could see. Someone who will never know what that man was to me; someone whose name I’ll never know."
— Marguerite Duras

"I'm still there, watching those possessed children, as far away from the mystery now as I was then. I've never written, though I thought I wrote, never loved, though I thought I loved, never done anything but wait outside the closed door."
— Marguerite Duras (The Lover)

""she can remember everyone admiring a rare kind of evening they spoke of as something they ought to save from oblivion to describe to their children later. And that for her part she would have had it hidden, had that late summer evening buried and burned to ashes." "
— Marguerite Duras (Blue Eyes, Black Hair)

"In a certain state of mind, all trace of feeling is banished. Whenever I remain silent in a certain way, I don't love you, have you noticed that?"
— Marguerite Duras (The Ravishing of Lol Stein)

"بدون توان جسمی نمیتوان نوشت.باید قوی بود خیلی تا از پس نوشته برآمد باید قوی تر از نوشته خود باشیم. چیز غریبی است.بله نوشتن فقط کلمه نیست نعره جانداران شب هم هست نعره همگان نعره شما و من زوزه سگها
عامیانگی همه گیر و نومیدکننده در جامعه همین است درد یعنی موسی و مسیح فراعنه ونیز همه کودکان یهودی وهمه یهودیان
خشن ترین منظر سعادت هم همین است و من این را باور دارم برای همیشه "
— Marguerite Duras

"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."
— Marguerite Duras (Blue Eyes, Black Hair)

"‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I think I must have invented him.’
‘I know all I want to about your child,’ Chauvin said harshly.
Anne Desbaresdes moaned again, louder than before. Again she put her hand on the table. His eyes followed her movement and finally, painfully, he understood and lifted his own leaden hand and placed it on hers. Their hands were so cold they were touching only in intention, an illusion, in order for this to be fulfilled, for the sole reason that it should be fulfilled, none other, it was no longer possible. And yet, with their hands frozen in this funereal pose, Anne Desbaresdes stopped moaning.
‘One last time,’ she begged, ‘tell me about it one last time.’
Chauvin hesitated, his eyes somewhere else, still fixed on the back wall. Then he decided to tell her about it as if it were a memory.
‘He had never dreamed, before meeting her, that he would one day want anything so badly.’
‘And she acquiesced completely?’
‘Wonderfully.’
Anne Desbaresdes looked at Chauvin absently. Her voice became thin, almost childlike.
‘I'd like to understand why his desire to have it happen one day was so wonderful?’
Chauvin still avoided looking at her. Her voice was steady, wooden, the voice of a deaf person.
‘There's no use trying to understand. It's beyond understanding.’
‘You mean there are some things like that that can't be gone into?’
‘I think so.’
Anne Desbaresdes' expression became dull, almost stupid. Her lips had turned pale, they were gray and trembled as though she were on the verge of tears.
‘She does nothing t try and stop him?’ she whispered.
‘No. Have a little more wine.’
She sipped her wine. He also drank, and his lips on the glass were also trembling.
‘Time,’ he said
‘Does it take a long time, a very long time?’
‘Yes, a very long time. But I don't know anything.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Like you, I don't know anything. Nothing at all.’
Anne Desbaresdes forced back her tears. Her voice was normal, momentarily awake.
‘She will never speak again,’ she said."
— Marguerite Duras (Moderato Cantabile)

"Suddenly, all at once, she knows, knows that he doesn't understand her, that he never will, that he lacks the power to understand such perverseness. And that he can never move fast enough to catch her."
— Marguerite Duras (The Lover)

"He wanted to pay her; he thought women ought to be paid for keeping men from dying or going out of their minds."
— Marguerite Duras

"People were used to those slow human speeds on both land and sea, to those delays, those waitings on the wind or fair weather, to those expectations of shipwreck, sun, and death. The liners the little white girl knew were among the last mailboats in the world. It was while she was young that the first airlines were started, which were gradually to deprive mankind of journeys across the sea. (The Lover)"
— Marguerite Duras

"Years after the war, after marriages, children, divorces, books, he came to Paris with his wife. He phoned her. It's me. She recognized him at once from the voice. He said, I just wanted to hear your voice. She said, it's me, hello. He was nervous, afraid, as before. His voice suddenly trembled. And with the trembling, suddenly, she heard again the voice of China. He knew she'd begun writing books, he'd heard about it through her motherwhom he'd met again in Saigon. And about her younger brother, and he'd been grieved for her. Then he didn't know what to say. And then he told her. Told her that it was as before, that he still loved her, he could never stop loving her, that he'd love her until death.


"
— Marguerite Duras (The Lover)

"In a thousand years time this day will have existed for a thousand years to the day. And the ignorance of the whole world about what they've said today will have a date too."
— Marguerite Duras (Blue Eyes, Black Hair)

"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."
— Marguerite Duras (Blue Eyes, Black Hair)

"We, her children, are heroic, dersperate."
— Marguerite Duras (The Lover)

"I don't want to know anything the way you do, with that death-derived certainty, that hopeless monotony, the same every day of your life, every night, and that deadly routine of lovelessness."
— Marguerite Duras (The Malady of Death)

"Banality is sometimes striking."
— Marguerite Duras (Hiroshima Mon Amour)