213 Quotes by Marguerite Duras

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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