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
eternity existence
No one understands eternity. One simply recognizes its existence.
writing translate
Translating is writing.
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.
love-is discovery not-sure
I am not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry.
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.
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.
mistake yield suffering
Do not mistake me. I am not yet weak enough to yield to fearful imaginings, which are almost as absurd as illusions of hope, and are certainly harder to bear. If I must deceive myself, I should prefer to stay on the side of confidence, for I shall lose no more there and shall suffer less.
passion expression blood
Passion such as hers is all consent, asking little in return. I had merely to enter a room where she was to see her face take on that peaceful expression of one who is resting in bed. If I touched her, I had the impression that all the blood in her veins was turning to honey.
mistake trying doe
Our great mistake is to try to exact from each person virtues which he does not possess, and to neglect the cultivation of those which he has.
teacher ideas voice
And nevertheless I have loved certain of my masters, and those strangely intimate though elusive relations existing between student and teacher, and the Sirens singing somewhere within the cracked voice of him who is first to reveal a new idea. The greatest seducer was not Alcibiades, afterall, it was Socrates.
prisoner
Every invalid is a prisoner.
get-well lying cutting
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.
passion thinking people
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.