Quotes by Marguerite Yourcenar

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Any narrated life becomes a parable; we write to attack or defend a system, to define a method that belongs to us.

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Art has become reality and reality has transfigured itself into art.

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Those who place the historical novel in a separate category forget that the novelist only interprets, with the help of the procedures of his time, a number of facts belonging to the past, memories conscious or not, personal or not, woven from the same matter as history. .

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In our time, the historical novel, or what has been allowed to be called that for convenience, can only be immersion in a rediscovered time, taking possession of an inner world.

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One of the best ways to recreate a man's thinking: to reconstruct his library.

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The memory of most people is like an abandoned cemetery where the dead, whom they have ceased to love, lie unhonored. Any prolonged pain is an insult to human forgetfulness.

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Every man has more qualities than he thinks, but only success makes them worthwhile.

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I've never stuck to an idea for fear of the mess I'd be in without it. I have never stretched a true fact with the juice of a lie, so that I could digest it better.

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I know that I do not know what I do not know: I envy those who will know more, but I do not know that they will have to, like me, measure, weigh, deduce and not trust the deductions made, to discern the part of truth from error, and in truth to account for the eternal mixture of error...