Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.

— Marguerite Duras

Paradoxically, the freedom of Paris is associated with a persistent belief that nothing ever changes. Paris, they say, is the city that changes least. After an absence of twenty or thirty years, one still recognize

— Marguerite Duras

The best way to fill time is to waste it.

— 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.

— Marguerite Duras

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 becomes one of the children.

— Marguerite Duras

The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken.

— Marguerite Duras

When it's in a book I don't think it'll hurt anymore ...exist anymore. One of the things writing does is wipe things out. Replace them.

— Marguerite Duras

Writing was the only thing that populated my life and made it magic.

— Marguerite Duras

You ask: Why is the malady of death fatal? She answers: Because whoever has it doesn't know he's a carrier, of death. And also because he's like to die without any life to die to, and without EVN knowing that's what he's doing.

— Marguerite Duras

You didn't have to attract desire. Either it was in the woman who aroused it or it didn't exist. Either it was there at first glance or else it had never been.

— Marguerite Duras