Marguerite Duras Quotes

I want you more than I should," she heard herself say. "I have you less than I want.

It's probably the worst feeling in the world, when you're deeply and madly in love with a woman and you know she's not feeling you the same way, and you don't know why.

Here I love you and the horizon hides you in vain. I love you still among these cold things. Sometimes my kisses go on those heavy vessels that cross the sea towards no arrival. I see myself forgotten like those old anchors. The piers sadden when the afternoon moors there. My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose. I love what I do not have. You are so far. My loathing wrestles with the slow twilights. But night comes and starts to sing to me.

There is nothing so mortifying as to fall in love with someone who does not share one's sentiments.

What could he mean by speaking so, as if I were always thinking that he cared for me, when I know he does not; he cannot. ... But I won't care for him. I surely am mistress enough of myself to control this wild, strange, miserable feeling

Longing hearts could only stand so much longing.

God only knows how much I'd love you if you let me, but I can't break through at all.

There are lovers content with longing. I’m not one of them.

Love was like rain: it turned into ice, or it disappeared. Now you saw it, now you couldn't find it no matter how hard you might search. Love evaporated; obsession was realer; it hurt, like a pin in your bottom, a stone in your shoe. It didn't go away in the blink of an eye. A morning phone call filled with regret. A letter that said, Dear you, good-bye from me. Obsession tasted like something familiar. Something you'd known your whole life. It settled and lurked; it stayed with you.

I love no one but you, I have discovered, but you are far away and I am here alone. Then this is my life and maybe, however unlikely, I'll find my way back there. Or maybe, one day, I'll settle for second best. And on that same day, hell will freeze over, the sun will burn out and the stars will fall from the sky.

I loved him so much. It didn't change all the reasons we couldn't be together, but it kept me returning to his body, kept my skin seeking his skin over and over again in the sad dance we did.

She fell asleep, lying there, her hand clasping his. Her last awareness, before she surrendered the responsibility of consciousness, was the sense of an enormous void, the void of a city and of a continent, where she would never be able to find the man whom she had no right to seek.

- Might it console you to know that I expect nothing but torture from her return? That I regard you as a bird of paradise? She shook her head. - That my admiration for you is painfully strong? - I want Van – she cried – and not intangible admiration. - Intangible? You goose. You my gauge it, you may brush it once very lightly with the knuckles of you gloved hand. I said knuckles. I said once. That will do. I can't kiss you. Not even your burning face. Good-bye, pet. Tell Edmond to take a nap after he returns. I shall need him at two in the morning.

Because what’s worse than knowing you want something, besides knowing you can never have it?

Her own misery filled her heart—there was no room in it for other people's sorrow.

I get that we can't be together. And it's not like I'm so weak-willed that the simple act of saying hello to me will cause me to jump your bones in the hall.

And then there's the sickness I feel from looking at legs I can't touch, or at lips that don't smile at me. Or hips that don't reach for me. And hearts that don't beat for me.

Any happiness, no matter how brief, seemed better than the long, simmering torture of waking up day after day, knowing I could never have him.

I want to tell you that I love you I want to tell you that I love you I want to tell you that I love I love I love I love but you do not.

The essence of romantic love is that wonderful beginning, after which sadness and impossibility may become the rule.

There is only one thing I want. I would like to be seriously ill, and to hear nothing more about him for at least a week. Why doesn't something happen to me? Why do I have to go through all this? If only I had never set eyes on him!

I don't have Steve. There is no having the Steve.

People will still love and hurt and yearn.