Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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That is what chills your spine when you read an account of a suicide: not the frail corpse hanging from the window bars but what happened inside that heart immediately before.
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Obviously, everything has always been defined by the dominant ideology. But the dominant ideology has been able to accept women's literature as well as men's literature. I would say that women have been hindered from creating for a variety of reasons, as Virginia Woolf so admirably explained in A Room of One's Own. When they have created, on the whole they have been recognized. In literature it hasn't been nearly as oppressive as in, say, painting, where even the existence of so many women painters has always been denied.
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I had never believed in the sacred nature of literature. God had died when I was fourteen.
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The role of a retired person is no longer to possess one.
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Anyway I know only too well that all life is nothing but a brief reprieve from death.
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She was not to look beyond herself for the meaning of her life.
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The American woman's inequality with men is proved by her defiant attitude.
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In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid.
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Men create their own gods and thus have some slight understanding that they are self-fabricated. Women are much more susceptible, because they are completely oppressed by men; they take men at their word and believe in the gods that men have made up. The situation of women, their culture, makes them kneel more often before the gods that have been created by men than men themselves do, who know what they've done. To this extent, women will be more fanatical, whether it is for fascism or for totalitarianism.
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In order to be an artist, one must be deeply rooted in the society.
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The torment that so many young women know, bound hand and foot by love and motherhood, without having forgotten their former dreams.
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This is certainly a very tricky point: How to ally yourself to other leftist forces without losing your feminist specificity.
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There are moments when you have to write certain things and you don't have to think of your sex. If you are writing about the population of the thirteenth district in Paris, even if you are writing on the women in the thirteenth district, there's no need to consider your sex.
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Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility. But we have seen that it is one of the lies of the serious mind to attempt to give the word "useful" an absolute meaning; nothing is useful if it is not useful to man; nothing is useful to man if the latter is not in a position to define his own ends and values, if he is not free.
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Old age is better for women than for men. First of all, they have less far to fall, since their lives are more mediocre than those of most men.
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Retirement revives the sorrow of parting, the feeling of abandonment, solitude and uselessness that is caused by the loss of some beloved person.
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It's frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself. It seems unfair. You can't assume the responsibility for everything you do --or don't do.
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The Sahara was a spectacle as alive as the sea. The tints of the dunes changed according to the time of day and the angle of the light: golden as apricots from far off, when we drove close to them they turned to freshly made butter; behind us they grew pink; from sand to rock, the materials of which the desert was made varied as much as its tints.
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A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.
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The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project.
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This has always been a man's world, and none of the reasons that have been offered in explanation have seemed adequate.
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Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, ans scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth.
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The curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the individuals are joined in their weakness rather than in their strength - each asking from the other instead of finding pleasure in giving.
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My worst mistake has been not grasping that time goes by. It was going by and there I was, set in the attitude of the ideal wife of an ideal husband. Instead of bringing our sexual relationship to life again I brooded happily over memories of our former nights together.