Marguerite Duras Quotes

there they laugh: they do not understand me; I am not the mouth for these ears.

But you people do not understand me, and I am afraid you never will.

A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.

The surest sign of the estrangement of the opinions of two persons is when they both say something ironical to each other and neither of them feels the irony.

The disconnect lasted too long. I think people got the idea I was sullen and couldn't communicate, which wasn't true.

When once estrangement has arisen between those who truly love each other, everything seems to widen the breach.

Where there is no love there is no understanding.

The fact that we are I don't know how many millions of people, yet communication, complete communication, is completely impossible between two of those people, is to me one of the biggest tragic themes in the world.

People misunderstand me.

I never had a real conversation with my father.

Father knew me not. All my aspirations in life were a sealed book to him, as much as his peculiar religious experiences were to me.

We were like deaf people trying to dance to a beat we couldn't hear, long after the music actually stopped.

We're all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.

I don't expect to be understood at all.

With this book in my hands, reading aloud to my friends, questioning them, explaining to them, I was made clearly to understand that I had no friends, that I was alone in the world. Because in not understanding the meaning of the words, neither I nor my friends, one thing became very clear and that was that there were ways of not understanding and that the difference between the non-understanding of one individual and the non-understanding of another created a world of terra firma even more solid than differences of understanding.

A mutual misunderstanding.

I could add her to the long list of people I didn't understand.

I understand a fury in your words But not your words.

And we went our separate ways without having understood each other. As in this world nobody understands the other easily.

...we were like two people standing apart on separate mountain peaks, recklessly leaning forward to throw stones at one another, unaware of the dangerous chasm that separated us.

Maybe, in the final analysis, they saw me as something I wasn't and I tried to turn them into something they could never be. I loved them all but maybe I never understood any of them. I don't think they understood me.

You don't dig me, I don't understand what it is, I had my car reupholstered.

You were trying to tell me something and I was trying to tell you something else. We didn't trust each other and that was reason enough to make each of us right.

At the heart of our misunderstanding and infantile behavior is the wish for a miracle cure.