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He formed his sentences hesitantly and then threw them at me with such force that I felt as if I were receiving a present each time.
Simone de Beauvoir -
She was not to look beyond herself for the meaning of her life.
Simone de Beauvoir
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One day I'll be old, dead, forgotten. And at this very moment, while I'm sitting here thinking these things, a man in a dingy hotel room is thinking, "I will always be here."
Simone de Beauvoir -
A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.
Simone de Beauvoir -
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.
Simone de Beauvoir -
There was a time, in the nineteenth century, for example, when women spoke mostly about the house, children, birth, and so forth, because it was their domain. That's changing a little, now.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Literature is born when something in life goes slightly adrift.
Simone de Beauvoir -
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
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What is an adult? A child blown up by age.
Simone de Beauvoir -
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.
Simone de Beauvoir -
The whole world was nothing but an exile with no hope of a return.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Work would be terribly boring if one did not play the game all out, passionately.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Ah, if only there were two of me, she thought, one who spoke and the other who listened, one who lived and one who watched, how I would love myself! I would envy no one.
Simone de Beauvoir -
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
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If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Simone de Beauvoir -
If I were proud of anything in my life, it would be of our love. I feel we have to tell to each other as many things as we can, so we are not only lovers, but the closest of friends at the same time.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Feminism is a revolutionary movement which is different from the class struggle movement, the proletarian movement, but which is a movement which must be leftist. By that I mean at the extreme left, a movement working to overthrow the whole society.
Simone de Beauvoir -
I'm not against mothers. I am against the ideology which expects every woman to have children, and I'm against the circumstances under which mothers have to have their children.
Simone de Beauvoir -
It is for man to establish the reign of liberty in the midst of the world of the given. To gain the supreme victory, it is necessary, for one thing, that by and through their natural differentiation men and women unequivocally affirm their brotherhood.
Simone de Beauvoir -
In truth we need to change the society itself, men as well as women, to change everything.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Writing ... is a profession that can only be learned by writing.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Patience is one of those feminine qualities which have their origin in our oppression but should be preserved after our liberation.
Simone de Beauvoir -
To be moral is to discover fundamentally ones own being.
Simone de Beauvoir