Marguerite Yourcenar Quotes
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the press is too often a distorting mirror, which deforms the people and events it represents, making them seem bigger or smaller than they really are.
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For me, a poet is someone who is 'in contact.' Someone through whom a current is passing.
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Our true birthplace is that in which we cast for the first time an intelligent eye on ourselves. My first homelands were my books.
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All happiness is a form of innocence.
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Every invalid is a prisoner.
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In the evenings the art of building gave way to that of music, which is architecture, too, though invisible.
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No one understands eternity. One simply recognizes its existence.
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The world is big … May it please the One who perchance is to expand the human heart to life's full measure.
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Books are not life, only its ashes.
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A young musician plays scales in his room and only bores his family. A beginning writer, on the other hand, sometimes has the misfortune of getting into print.
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We say: mad with joy. We should say: wise with grief.
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Ancient and oriental civilizations were more sensitive than we are to the cycles of things; to the succession of generations, both divine and human; and to change within stasis. Western man is virtually alone in wanting to make his God into a fortress and personal immortality into a bulwark against time.
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The founding of libraries was like constructing more public granaries, amassing reserves against a spiritual winter which by certain signs, in spite of myself, I see ahead.
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Little soul, gentle and drifting, guest and companion of my body, now you will dwell below in pallid places, stark and bare; there you will abandon your play of yore. But one moment still, let us gaze together on these familiar shores, on these objects which doubtless we shall not see again....Let us try, if we can, to enter into death with open eyes.
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[On travel:] Who would be so besotted as to die without having made at least the round of this, his prison?
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Every life is punctuated by deaths and departures, and each one causes great suffering that it is better to endure rather than forgo the pleasure of having known the person who has passed away. Somehow our world rebuilds itself after every death, and in any case we know that none of us will last forever. So you might say that life and death lead us by the hand, firmly but tenderly.
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Sickness disgusts us with death, and we wish to get well, which is a way of wishing to live. But weakness and suffering, with manifold bodily woes, soon discourage the invalid from trying to regain ground: he tires of those respites which are but snares, of that faltering strength, those ardors cut short, and that perpetual lying in wait for the next attack.
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I don't think I ever relinquish a person I have known, and surely not my fictional characters. I see them, I hear them, with a clarity that I would call hallucinatory if hallucination didn't mean something else ... A character whom we create can never die, any more than a friend can die ... Through [my characters] I've lived many parallel lives.
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nothing is slower than the true birth of a man
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Leaving behind books is even more beautiful — there are far too many children.
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A book may lie dormant for fifty years or for two thousand years in a forgotten corner of a library, only to reveal, upon being opened, the marvels or the abysses that it contains, or the line that seems to have been written for me alone. In this respect the writer is not different from any other human being: whatever we say or do can have far-reaching consequences.
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On the whole, however, it is only out of pride or gross ignorance, or cowardice, that we refuse to see in the present the lineaments of times to come.
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Translating is writing.
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I knew that good like bad becomes a routine, that the temporary tends to endure, that what is external permeates to the inside, and that the mask, given time, comes to be the face itself.
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Want of passion is, I think, a very striking characteristic of Americans, not unrelated to their predilection for violence. For very few people truly have a passionate desire to achieve, and violence serves as a kind of substitute.
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But happiness is brittle, and if men and circumstances don't destroy it, it is threatened by ghosts.
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To stay in one place and watch the seasons come and go is tanatmount to constant travel: One is traveling with the earth.
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The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish. Any lasting grief is reproof to their neglect.
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I think still that someone wiser than I might well have remained happy till his death.
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A touch of madness is, I think, almost always necessary for constructing a destiny.
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