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Marguerite Yourcenar Quotes
1903–1987 Belgium
Marguerite Cleenewerck de Crayencour (June 8 1903 – December 17 1987) was a Belgian-born French novelist who wrote under the pseudonym Marguerite Yourcenar. She was the first woman to be elected to the Académie française.
Belgium Academics Authors Essayists Novelists Also known as: Marguerite Cleenewerck de Crayencour, Yourcenar, Marguerite
Random Marguerite Yourcenar quote
31 quotes
One must not fear the words anymore when one consented to the things.
Alexis (1929)
Who would be so besotted as to die without having made at least the round of this, his prison?
The Abyss (1968)
To have merit to abstain from a fault, is a manner to be guilty.
Alexis (1929)
In alchemical treatises, the formula L'Oeuvre au Noir … designates what is said to be the most difficult phase of the alchemist's process, the separation and dissolution of substance.
The Abyss (1968)
At this period of his existence, meat and blood, entrails, and all that had ever lived and breathed disgusted him as food, for an animal dies in pain just as man does, and it repelled him to be digesting death's agony.
The Abyss (1968)
Our defects are sometimes the better adversaries when we oppose our vices.
Alexis (1929)
We believe ourselves pure as long as we despise what we do not desire.
Alexis (1929)
All would have transformed us if we had the courage to be what we are.
Alexis (1929)
Every silence is composed of nothing but unspoken words. Perhaps that is why I became a musician. Someone had to express this silence, make it render up all the sadness it contained, make it sing as it were. Someone had to use not words, which are always too precise not to be cruel, but simply music.
Alexis (1929)
Beyond this village, other villages; beyond this abbey, other abbeys; and after the fortress, more fortresses still. And each of these castles of stone and each wooden hut has its structure of fixed ideas or flimsy, ill-based opinions superposed above it within which fools stay immured, but the wise find apertures for escape.
The Abyss (1968)
The skirmishes with the theologians had had their charm, but he knew well that no lasting accord exists between those who seek, ponder, and dissect and pride themselves on being capable of thinking tomorrow other than they do today, and those who accept the Faith, or declare that they do, and oblige their fellow men to do the same, on pain of death.
The Abyss (1968)
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