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Actors, Acting
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Acting doesn't bring anything to a text. On the contrary, it detracts from it.
-Marguerite Duras
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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
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Alcohol/Alcoholism
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Home
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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
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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
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Journalism
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I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.
-Marguerite Duras
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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
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Love
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It was the men I deceived the most that I loved the most.
-Marguerite Duras
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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
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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
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Men
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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
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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
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Men & Women
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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
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Mother
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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
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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
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Relationships
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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
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Sex
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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
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Time
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The best way to fill time is to waste it.
-Marguerite Duras
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Women
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It's only women who are not really quite women at all, frivolous women who have no idea, who neglect repairs.
-Marguerite Duras
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Books by and about Marguerite Duras