Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
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To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future.
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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.
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No existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself.
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Work would be terribly boring if one did not play the game all out, passionately.
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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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In a way, literature is true than life,' he said to himself. 'On paper, you say exactly and completely what you feel. How easy it is to break things off on paper! You hate, you shout, you kill, you commit suicide; you carry things to the very end. And that's why it's false. But it's damned satisfying. In life, you're constantly denying yourself, and others are always contradicting you. On paper, I make time stand still and I impose my convictions on the whole world; they become the only reality.
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What is an adult? A child blown up by age.
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Buying is a profound pleasure.
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For years I thought my work still lay ahead, and now I find it is behind me: there was no moment when it took place.
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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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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.
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Old age is life's parody.
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To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.
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Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay.
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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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I think it's wrong to write in a totally esoteric language when you want to talk about things which interest a multitude of women.
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If the writer is a woman, feminist or not, it will give the language something that it would not have if it had been used by a man.
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In truth we need to change the society itself, men as well as women, to change everything.
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In every society the artist or writer remains an outsider.
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In fact, people seem to be tired of fiction now. There are so many other ways of exploring humanity - by ethnology, psychoanalysis, and so on. It's a little boring to make up stories. So many people think that it's better to be very close to reality and to recount one's life as it is rather than to fictionalize, as they say, that is to transpose, and therefore to cheat.
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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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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.