Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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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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The whole world was nothing but an exile with no hope of a return.
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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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Writing ... is a profession that can only be learned by 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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A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong.
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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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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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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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It is so difficult not to become vain about one's own good luck.
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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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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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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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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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Work would be terribly boring if one did not play the game all out, passionately.
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I willingly trust myself to chance. I let my thoughts wander, I digress, not only sitting at my work, but all day long, all night even. It often happens that a sentence suddenly runs through my head before I go to bed, or when I am unable to sleep, and I get up again and write it down.
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The arrogance of some Christians would close heaven to them if, to their misfortune, it existed.
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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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One can not start by saying that our earthly destiny has or has not importance, for it depends upon us to give it importance.
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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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All the idols made by man, however terrifying they may be, are in point of fact subordinate to him, and that is why he will always have it in his power to destroy them.
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Immortality is a terrible curse.
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To be moral is to discover fundamentally ones own being.