marguerite yourcenar Quotes

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.

- Marguerite Yourcenar

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

- Marguerite Yourcenar

It is symptomatic of the constricting specialism and the oppressive burden of fact of our time that it has been left to the imagination of a novelist, Marguerite Yourcenar, to create the broadest, the most balanced and in many ways the most authentic interpretation of the affair.

- Royston Lambert

Laws change more slowly than custom, and though dangerous when they fall behind the times are more dangerous still when the presume to anticipate custom.

- Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

Any truth creates a scandal.

- Marguerite Yourcenar

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

- Marguerite Yourcenar

More sensitive to Rome's prejudices than I was aware, I recalled that although they grant sensuality a rôle they see only shameful folly in love;

- Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

He had come to that time in his life (it varies for every man) when a human being gives himself over to his demon or to his genius according to a mysterious law which orders him either to destroy or to surpass himself.

- Marguerite Yourcenar

This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?

- Marguerite Yourcenar

Any law too often subject to infraction is bad; it is the duty of the legislator to repeal or to change it, lest the contempt into which that rash ruling has fallen should extend to other, more just legislation.

- Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

You focus on telling stories,
we do everything else.