Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future.
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All success cloaks a surrender.
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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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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 Communists, following Hegel, speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion.
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Words have to murder reality before they can hold it captive.
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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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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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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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The misfortune is that although everyone must come to death, each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her.
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Eating, sleeping, cleaning - the years no longer rise up toward heaven, they lie spread out ahead, gray and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won. Washing, ironing, sweeping, ferreting out rolls of lint from under wardrobes - all this halting of decay is also the denial of life; for time simultaneously creates and destroys, and only its negative aspect concerns the housekeeper.
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The earthly meaning of eternal life was death, and she refused to die.
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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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Anyway I know only too well that all life is nothing but a brief reprieve from death.
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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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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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Work almost always has a double aspect: it is a bondage, a wearisome drudgery; but it is also a source of interest, a steadying element, a factor that helps to integrate the worker with society. Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.
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Literature is born when something in life goes slightly adrift.
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A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong.
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Writing ... is a profession that can only be learned by writing.
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In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid.
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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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If women really did have complete equality with men, society would be completely overturned.