Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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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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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.
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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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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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If women really did have complete equality with men, society would be completely overturned.
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Women aren't more easily swayed by fascism than men, but I believe that their situation makes them in effect more slavish than men.
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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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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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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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I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.
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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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Words have to murder reality before they can hold it captive.
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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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Literature is born when something in life goes slightly adrift.
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The individuals who seem to us most outstanding, who are honored with the name of genius, are those who have proposed to enact the fate of all humanity in their personal existences.
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Between women love is contemplative; caresses are intended less to gain possession of the other than gradually to re-create the self through her; separateness is abolished, there is no struggle, no victory, no defeat; in exact reciprocity each is at once subject and object, sovereign and slave; duality become mutuality.
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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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All success cloaks a surrender.
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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 American woman's inequality with men is proved by her defiant attitude.
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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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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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The earthly meaning of eternal life was death, and she refused to die.
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There are topics which are common to men and women. I think that if a woman speaks of oppression, of misery, she will speak of it in exactly the same way as a man. But if she speaks of her own personal problems as a woman, she will obviously speak in another way.