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Marguerite Yourcenar Biography

Marguerite Yourcenar

Marguerite Yourcenar (French pronunciation: [maʁɡəʁit juʁsənaʁ]; 8 June 1903 – 17 December 1987) was a French novelist and essayist born in Brussels, Belgium, who became a US citizen in 1947. 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.

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Marguerite Yourcenar Quotes

Leaving behind books is even more beautiful — there are far too many children.

Beautiful, Book, Books, Children

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.

Media, Mirror, Mirrors, People, Represents, Smaller

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.

Book, Emotional, Thirty, Time, Written, Years

Every hour has its immediate duty, its special injunction which dominates all others.

Dominates, Duty, Hours, Injunction, Special

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

Thinking, Might, Wells, Death, Happy, Think

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.

Accessories, Goddess, Passionately, Who Cares, Women

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.

Character, Give, Giving, Necessary, Nourishes, Two

The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.

Book, School, Hadrian, Lesser, Birthplace, Time

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.

Cutting, Get Well, Lying, Regain, Strength, Woes

Everything is too far away in the past, or mysteriously too close.

Past, Far Away, Everything, Mysteriously, Close, Away

I knew that good like bad becomes a routine, that the temporary tends to endure, that what is external permeates to the inside, and that the mask, given time, comes to be the face itself.

Bad, Change, Good, Life, Tends, Wisdom

There are stages in bread-making quite similar to the stages of writing. You begin with something shapeless, which sticks to your fingers, a kind of paste. Gradually that paste becomes more and more firm. Then there comes a point when it turns rubbery. Finally, you sense that the yeast has begun to do its work: the dough is alive. Then all you have to do is let it rest. But in the case of a book the work may take ten years.

Book, Writing, Years, Sense, Rubbery, Take

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.

Come, Heroism, Men, Position, Take, Thinking

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

Besotted, Having, Prison, Round, Travel, Would Be

All happiness is a work of art: the smallest error falsifies it, the slightest hesitation alters it, the least heaviness spoils it, the slightest stupidity brutalizes it.

Art, Errors, Stupidity, Alters, Spoils, Hesitation

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.

Ideas, Intimate, Strangely, Student, Teacher, Voice

age means nothing. If anything I feel that I'm still a child: eternity and childhood are my ages.

Ages, Child, Childhood, Children, Mean, Nothing

We say: mad with joy. We should say: wise with grief.

Adversity, Grief, Joy, Wise

There are books which one should not attempt before having passed the age of forty.

Age, Book, Books, Forty, Passed, Should

Everything turns out to be valuable that one does for one’s self without thought of profit.

Doe, Ones, Profit, Self, Turns, Valuable

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