Love Quote by Marguerite Duras

Duras delivers romance with the gloves off: love is not a halo over men, it is a tolerance so intense it starts to look like devotion. The repetition of "very, very fond" is doing double duty. It sounds like a child insisting, but it also reads like a warning label. Affection, she implies, isn’t the pleasant baseline; it’s an extreme condition you have to cultivate to keep the reality of men from curdling into disgust.

The sting is in "Otherwise they're simply unbearable". Duras doesn’t say men are occasionally unbearable, or unbearable in the wrong circumstances. She makes it a default setting. Love becomes less a spontaneous feeling than a discipline: a decision to find men endearing enough to survive their entitlement, their noise, their neediness, their casual cruelties. "Fond" is strategically small and domestic compared to the grandiosity of "love". It’s the word you use for a pet, a habit, a person you know too well. Duras pulls love down from the pedestal and pins it to daily life, where intimacy is inseparable from irritation.

Context matters: Duras wrote from inside 20th-century literary modernity and its gender politics, with relationships often framed as power struggles rather than soulmate fantasies. The line carries a distinctly Durasian bleak comedy: the world is messy, men are difficult, and love is what you do when you insist on staying anyway. The subtext isn’t misandry so much as a refusal to romanticize what women are asked to endure, and a dare to admit how much work "love" really takes.