Marguerite Yourcenar Quotes About Books

Quotes about: Books

• Our true birthplace is that in which we cast for the first time an intelligent eye on ourselves. My first homelands were my books.

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Book, Eye, Intelligent

• 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.

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Book, School, Hadrian

  Marguerite Yourcenar (1954). “Memoirs of Hadrian”, New York, Farrar

• Books are not life, only its ashes.

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Book, Ashes

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

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Beautiful, Children, Book

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

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Book, Age, Should

• One reads thousands of books, of poets, modern and ancient, as one meets thousands of people. What remains of it all is hard to tell.

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Book, People, Ancient

• 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.

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Book, Emotional, Years

• A book may lie dormant for fifty years or for two thousand years in a forgotten corner of a library, only to reveal, upon being opened, the marvels or the abysses that it contains, or the line that seems to have been written for me alone. In this respect the writer is not different from any other human being: whatever we say or do can have far-reaching consequences.

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Lying, Book, Years

• 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.

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Book, Writing, Years

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