Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal.
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It is so difficult not to become vain about one's own good luck.
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You have never had any confidence in him. And if he has no confidence in himself it is because he sees himself through your eyes.
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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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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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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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I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.
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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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To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.
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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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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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If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
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What is an adult? A child blown up by age.
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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.
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It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator loaded with all the contradictions of the world.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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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In every society the artist or writer remains an outsider.
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If you haven't been happy very young, you can still be happy later on, but it's much harder. You need more luck.
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A life is such a strange object, at one moment translucent, at another utterly opaque, an object I make with my own hands, an object imposed on me, an object for which the world provides the raw material and then steals it from me again, pulverized by events, scattered, broken, scored yet retaining its unity; how heavy it is and how inconsistent: this contradiction breeds many misunderstandings.
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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.