Four Novels By Marguerite Duras - The Square - Moderato Cantabile - 10 Quotes

“I want to belong to myself, to own something, not necessarily something very wonderful, but something which is mine, a place of my own, maybe only one room, but mine. Why sometimes I even find myself dreaming of a gas stove.”
― Marguerite Duras, Four Novels: The Square, Moderato Cantabile, 10:30 on a Summer Night, The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas

“There was one day in my life, just one, when I no longer wanted to live. I was hungry, and as I had no money it was absolutely essential for me to work if I was to eat. It was as if I had forgotten that this was as true of everyone as of me. That day I felt quite unused to life and there seemed no point in going on living because I couldn’t see why things should go on for me as they did for other people. It took me a whole day to get over this feeling. Then, of course, I took my suitcase to the market and afterwards I had a meal and things went on as they had before. But with this difference, that ever since that day I find that any thought of the future—and after all thinking of a refrigerator is thinking of the future—is much more frightening than before.”
― Marguerite Duras, Four Novels: The Square, Moderato Cantabile, 10:30 on a Summer Night, The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas

“Traveling is a great distraction. Everyone has always traveled, the Greeks, the Phoenicians: it has always been so, all through history.”
― Marguerite Duras, Four Novels: The Square, Moderato Cantabile, 10:30 on a Summer Night, The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas

“You can see as many towns as you like but it never gets you anywhere. And once you have stopped looking, there you are, exactly where you were before.”
― Marguerite Duras, Four Novels: The Square, Moderato Cantabile, 10:30 on a Summer Night, The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas

“I understand, but I’ve come back from a long journey and now I’m resting. I never much like thinking of the future and today, when I’m resting, even less: that’s why I am so bad at explaining to you how it is I can put up with my life as it is and not change it, and what is more, not even be able to imagine changing. I’m sorry.”
― Marguerite Duras, Four Novels: The Square, Moderato Cantabile, 10:30 on a Summer Night, The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas

“But I can’t start thinking of anything yet, not even the smallest thing. My life has not begun except, of course, for the fact that I am alive. There are times, in summer for example when the weather is fine, when I feel that something might have begun for me even without there being any proof of it, and then I am frightened. I become frightened of giving in to the fine weather and forgetting what I want even for a second, of losing myself in something unimportant. I am sure that if at this stage I started thinking of anything except the one big thing, I would be lost.”
― Marguerite Duras, Four Novels: The Square, Moderato Cantabile, 10:30 on a Summer Night, The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas

“There is nothing people cannot get accustomed to, even to a life like mine, and so I must be careful, very careful indeed, not to become accustomed to it myself.”
― Marguerite Duras, Four Novels: The Square, Moderato Cantabile, 10:30 on a Summer Night, The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas