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. Marguerite Yourcenar More Quotes by Marguerite Yourcenar More Quotes From Marguerite Yourcenar I have never seasoned a truth with the sauce of a lie in order to digest it more easily Marguerite Yourcenar honesty truth lying For me, a poet is someone who is 'in contact.' Someone through whom a current is passing. Marguerite Yourcenar passing currents poet Books are not life, only its ashes. Marguerite Yourcenar ashes book When two texts, or two assertions, perhaps two ideas, are in contradiction, be ready to reconcile them rather than cancel one by the other; regard them as two different facets, or two successive stages, of the same reality, a reality convincingly human just because it is too complex. Marguerite Yourcenar science reality ideas Life is atrocious, we know. But precisely because I expect little of the human condition, man's periods of felicity, his partial progress, his efforts to begin over again and continue, all seem to me like so many prodigies which nearly compensate for the monstrous mass of ills and defeats, of indifference and error. Catastrophe and ruin will come; disorder will triumph, but order will too, from time to time. Marguerite Yourcenar loss men order No one understands eternity. One simply recognizes its existence. Marguerite Yourcenar existence eternity 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. Marguerite Yourcenar landscape here-and-there training This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream? Marguerite Yourcenar bed cities dream 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. Marguerite Yourcenar library spiritual winter Every invalid is a prisoner. Marguerite Yourcenar prisoner One reads thousands of books, of poets, modern and ancient, as one meets thousands of people. What remains of it all is hard to tell. Marguerite Yourcenar ancient book people Leaving behind books is even more beautiful — there are far too many children. Marguerite Yourcenar beautiful book children I have come to think that great men are characterized precisely by the extreme position which they take, and that their heroism consists in holding to that extremity throughout their lives. Marguerite Yourcenar heroism men thinking [On travel:] Who would be so besotted as to die without having made at least the round of this, his prison? Marguerite Yourcenar prison would-be travel The world is big … May it please the One who perchance is to expand the human heart to life's full measure. Marguerite Yourcenar heart may world Of all our games, love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul. Marguerite Yourcenar soul games play The American child, driven to school by bus and stupefied by television, is losing contact with reality. There is an enormous gap between the sheer weight of the textbooks that he carries home from school and his capacity to interpret what is in them. Marguerite Yourcenar education home children 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. Marguerite Yourcenar passion people thinking I could say that all my books were conceived by the time I was twenty, although they were not to be written for another thirty or forty years. But perhaps this is true of most writers—the emotional storage is done very early on. Marguerite Yourcenar emotional book years A being afire with life cannot foresee death; in fact, by each of his deeds he denies that death exists. Marguerite Yourcenar deny deeds facts
