MARGUERITE DURAS

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.

Heterosexuality is dangerous. It tempts you to aim at a perfect duality of desire.

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

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.

It was the men I deceived the most that I loved the most.

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

Alcohol is barren. The words a man speaks in the night of drunkenness fade like the darkness itself at the coming of day.

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.

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

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.

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

I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhoods and in all the lives that follow them, the mother represents madness. Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.

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.

Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable.

The best way to fill time is to waste it.

In love there are no vacations. No such thing. Love has to be lived fully with its boredom and all that.

Stormy skies, says Ernesto. He grieved for them. Summer rain. Childhood.

I don't have general views about anything, except social injustice.

Frigidity is desire imagined by a woman who doesnt desire the man offering himself to her. Its the desire of a woman for a man who hasnt yet come to her, whom she doesnt yet know. Shes faithful to this stranger even before she belongs to him. Frigidity is the non-desire for whatever is not him.

A woman's work, from the time she gets up to the time she goes to bed, is as hard as a day at war, worse than a man's working day. ... To men, women's work was like the rain-bringing clouds, or the rain itself. The task involved was carried out every day as regularly as sleep. So men were happy - men in the Middle Ages, men at the time of the Revolution, and men in 1986: everything in the garden was lovely.

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.

Life is only lived full-time by women with children.

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?

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.

There are many women who write as they think they should write - to imitate men and make a place for themselves in literature.