Time & Perspective Quote by Marguerite Duras

Duras’s line has the mischievous snap of a paradox, but it’s also a manifesto smuggled in as a shrug. “Fill time” is the language of schedules, productivity apps, and the anxious modern promise that an hour must be made useful to be justified. By yoking it to “waste,” Duras flips the moral accounting: time doesn’t need redeeming. It needs inhabiting.

The intent isn’t simply to celebrate laziness. It’s to defend a kind of attention that can’t be monetized or neatly narrated. “Waste” suggests what escapes the ledger: drifting, waiting, staring out a window, the unproductive hours where memory recombines and desire clarifies. For a novelist whose work often circles silence, absence, repetition, and the slow burn of obsession, this is craft advice disguised as provocation. The page is fed by what looks, from the outside, like nothing happening.

The subtext is a critique of control. If you’re desperate to “fill” time, you’re treating it like a container and yourself like a manager. Duras proposes the opposite relationship: surrender as a technique. Wasted time becomes a refusal to turn life into a to-do list, a small sabotage of the culture that equates busyness with virtue.

Context matters, too. Duras wrote out of a century marked by catastrophe and ideological certainties that promised meaning, delivered rubble. Against that backdrop, “wasting time” reads as an existential insistence: not every minute must serve a cause. Sometimes the most honest use of time is letting it pass, and letting yourself change while it does.