Marguerite Yourcenar Quotations

One nourishes one's created characters with one's own substance: it's rather like the process of gestation. To give the character life, or to give him back life, it is of course necessary to fortify him by contributing something of one's own humanity, but it doesn't follow from that that the character is I, the writer, or that I am the character. The two entities remain distinct.

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.

[On travel:] Who would be so besotted as to die without having made at least the round of this, his prison?

I think still that someone wiser than I might well have remained happy till his death.

Any truth creates a scandal.

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.

Of all our games, love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul...

Every invalid is a prisoner.

A being afire with life cannot foresee death; in fact, by each of his deeds he denies that death exists.

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.