186 Quotes by Marguerite Yourcenar

To stay in one place and watch the seasons come and go is tanatmount to constant travel: One is traveling with the earth.

The written word has taught me to listen to the human voice, much as the great unchanging statues have taught me to appreciate bodily motions.

A touch of madness is, I think, almost always necessary for constructing a destiny.

I knew that good like bad becomes a routine, that the temporary tends to endure, that what is external permeates to the inside, and that the mask, given time, comes to be the face itself.

The mask, given time, comes to be the face itself.

Little soul, gentle and drifting, guest and companion of my body, now you will dwell below in pallid places, stark and bare; there you will abandon your play of yore. But one moment still, let us gaze together on these familiar shores, on these objects which doubtless we shall not see again... Let us try, if we can, to enter into death with open eyes...

It is not that I despise men. If I did I should have no right, and no reason, to try to govern.

Suffering turns us into egotists, for it absorbs us completely: it is later, in the form of memory, that it teaches us compassion.

I could say that all my books were conceived by the time I was twenty, although they were not to be written for another thirty or forty years. But perhaps this is true of most writers – the emotional storage is done very early on.