Marguerite Yourcenar
FameRank: 4

"Marguerite Yourcenar" was a Belgian-born French novelist and essayist. 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 List of members of the Académie française#Seat 3/Seat 3.

If you enjoy these quotes, be sure to check out other famous novelists! More Marguerite Yourcenar on Wikipedia.

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.

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 complex.

[*] Memoirs of Hadrian ... Catastrophe and ruin will come; disorder will triumph, but order will too, from time to time.

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

I have never seasoned a truth with the sauce of a lie in order to digest it more easily.

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.