Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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On the evenings when my parents held parties, the drawing-room mirrors multiplied to infinity the scintillations of a crystal chandelier. Mama would take her seat at the grand piano to accompany a lady dressed in a cloud of tulle who played the violin and a cousin who performed on a cello. I would crack between my teeth the candied shell of an artificial fruit, and a burst of light would illuminate my palate with a taste of blackcurrant or pineapple: all the colours, all the lights were mine, the gauzy scarves, the diamonds, the laces; I held the whole party in my mouth.
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I think that The Second Sex will seem an old, dated book, after a while. But nonetheless, a book which will have made its contribution. At least, I hope so.
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I am not at all for a feminism which is entirely separatist, which would say, "this domain is purely for women." I don't believe that at all.
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To be moral is to discover fundamentally ones own being.
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The Communists, following Hegel, speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion.
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The day had been spent in the expectation of these hours, and now they were crumbling away, becoming, in their turn, another period of expectancy...It was a journey without end, leading to an indefinite future, eternally shifting just as she was reaching the present.
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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.
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If the feminine issue is so absurd, is because the male's arrogance made it "a discussion.
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Hegel held that the two sexes were of necessity different, the one being active and the other passive, and of course the female would be the passive one.
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The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won. Absurdity challenges every ethics; but also the finished rationalization of the real would leave no room for ethics; it is because man's condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure and outrageousness, to save his existence.
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The earthly meaning of eternal life was death, and she refused to die.
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Many things would be changed for Americans if they would only admit that there is ill-luck in this world and that misfortune is not a priori a crime.
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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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Few books are more thrilling than certain confessions, but they must be honest, and the author must have something to confess.
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In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid.
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It is so difficult not to become vain about one's own good luck.
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Marriage is traditionally the destiny offered to women by society. Most women are married or have been, or plan to be or suffer from not being.
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Existence must be asserted in the present if one does not want all life to be defined as an escape toward nothingness.
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The women of today are in a fair way to dethrone the myth of femininity; they are beginning to affirm their independence in concrete ways; but they do not easily succeed in living completely the life of a human being.
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I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.
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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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All success cloaks a surrender.
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I consider it almost antifeminist to say that there is a feminine nature which expresses itself differently, that a woman speaks her body more than a man, because after all, men also speak their bodies when they write. Everything is implicated in the work of a writer.
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I think that feminism permits women to speak among themselves, instead of simply being resentful, having personal complaints, which get them nowhere and which make them sick and ill-tempered, depressive and poison the lives of their husbands and children. It's much better to arrive at a collective consciousness of this problem, which is both a kind of therapy and the basis for a struggle.