Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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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."
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Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me.
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Women's mutual understanding comes from the fact that they identify themselves with each other; but for the same reason each is against the others.
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And without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one's liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.
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Because we are separated everything separates us, even our efforts to join each other.
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Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death.
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Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.
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Most feminists in France came to feminism after '68 as a result of the hypocrisy they experienced in leftist movements. In these movements, where everyone believed there was going to be true equality, fraternity between men and women, and that together they were going to struggle against this rotten society, even there they noticed that the leftists, the militants, kept them "in their place." Women made the coffee while the others did the talking; they were the ones who typed the letters.
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It's not a very big step from contentment to complacency.
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Every time I start on a new book, I am a beginner again. I doubt myself, I grow discouraged, all the work accomplished in the past is as though it never was, my first drafts are so shapeless that it seems impossible to go on with the attempt at all, right up until the moment - always imperceptible, there, too, there is a break - when it is has become impossible not to finish it.
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Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male's superiority.
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At bottom, antipsychiatry is still psychiatry. And it doesn't really address itself to women's problems.
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A day in which I don't write leaves a taste of ashes.
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Let women be provided with living strength of their own.
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Only a woman can write what it is to feel as a woman, to be a woman.
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There is only one good. And that is to act according to the dictates of one's conscience.
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I have never read a really good novel written by a man where women are portrayed as they truly are. They can be portrayed externally very well - Stendhal's Madame de Renal, for example - but only as seen from the outside.
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To refuse everything, to say, even when there is something which really should be done, "Ah, that's no longer feminist," is a pessimistic, even masochistic tendency in women, the result of having been habituated to inertia, to pessimism.
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When an individual (or a group of individuals) is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he is inferior.
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Sometimes you can accept an important post, on condition that it really puts you in a position to help women. Unfortunately, women who have important posts very often adopt masculine standards-power, ambition, personal success - and cut themselves off from other women.
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There is a poetry in making preserves; the housewife has caught duration in the snare of sugar, she has enclosed life in jars.
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I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself
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There you are. The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heartbreaking, both at the same time. --But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself.
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Every time a man dies, a child dies too, and an adolescent and a young man as well; everyone weeps for the one who was dear to him.