Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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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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We always come back to the same vicious circle - an extreme degree of material or intellectual poverty does away with the means of alleviating it.
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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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History is a great cemetery: men, deeds, ideas are always dying as soon as they are born.
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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.
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If women really did have complete equality with men, society would be completely overturned.
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The American woman's inequality with men is proved by her defiant attitude.
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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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There are jobs that can be done equally well by men or by women and that finally you can't see a difference. But from the moment that you involve yourself fully in writing a novel, for example, or an essay, then you are involved as a woman, in the same way that you can't deny your nationality - you are French, you are a man, you are a woman... all this passes into the writing.
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Literature in France seems to be undergoing a crisis now, and nothing comes immediately to mind.
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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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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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My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute. One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away.
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The past is not a peaceful landscape lying there behind me, a country in which I can stroll wherever I please, and will gradually show me all its secret hills and dales. As I was moving forward, so it was crumbling. Most of the wreckage that can be seen is colourless, distorted, frozen: its meaning escapes me... all that's left is a skeleton. I shall never find my plans again, my hopes and fears - I shall not find myself.
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It is a difficult matter for man to realize the extreme importance of social discriminations which seem outwardly insignificant but which produce in woman moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to spring from her original nature.
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To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.
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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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Buying is a profound pleasure.
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Immortality is a terrible curse.
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To be moral is to discover fundamentally ones own being.
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Literature is born when something in life goes slightly adrift.
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Work would be terribly boring if one did not play the game all out, passionately.
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As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.
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The whole world was nothing but an exile with no hope of a return.