Marguerite Yourcenar
Marguerite Yourcenar
Marguerite Yourcenarwas a Belgian-born French novelist and essayist. Winner of the Prix Femina and the Erasmus Prize, she was the first woman elected to the Académie française, in 1980, and the seventeenth person to occupy Seat 3...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 June 1903
CountryUnited States of America
writing expression choices
Writing is a perpetual choice between a thousand expressions, none of which satisfies me, none of which, above all, satisfies me without the others. Yet I ought to know that only music permits a succession of chords.
poet passing currents
For me, a poet is someone who is 'in contact.' Someone through whom a current is passing.
love-is discovery not-sure
I am not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry.
philosophy moving destiny
For my part I have sought liberty more than power, and power only because it can lead to freedom. What interested me was not a philosophy of the free man (all who try that have proved tiresome), but a technique: I hoped to discover the hinge where our will meets and moves with destiny, and where discipline strengthens, instead of restraining, our nature.
dream cities bed
This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?
training landscape here-and-there
The landscape of my days appears to be composed, like mountainous regions, of varied materials heaped up pell-mell. There I see my nature, itself composite, made up of equal parts of instinct and training. Here and there protrude the granite peaks of the inevitable, but all about is rubble from the landslips of chance.
agreement matter morality
Morals are a matter of private agreement; decency is of public concern.
faces mask given
The mask, given time, comes to be the face itself
beautiful children book
Leaving behind books is even more beautiful — there are far too many children.
spiritual journey earth
To stay in one place and watch the seasons come and go is tanatmount to constant travel: One is traveling with the earth.
women care temples
Men who care passionately for women attach themselves at least as much to the temple and to the accessories of the cult as to their goddess herself.
heart world may
The world is big … May it please the One who perchance is to expand the human heart to life's full measure.
spiritual winter library
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…
writing hands play
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.