Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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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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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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The state of emotional intoxication allows one to grasp existence in one's self and in the other, as both subjectivity and passivity. The two partners merge in this ambiguous unity; each one is freed of his own presence and achieves immediate communication with the other.
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It's not a very big step from contentment to complacency.
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Truthfully speaking, women are dangerous, even those who aren't feminists, because there has always been a women's revolt. Only it has usually translated itself into solitary, individualist, disagreeable manifestations - the whole history of the taming of the shrew, the woman-shrew. They weren't shrews without cause.
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Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me.
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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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I don't want to be just another blade of grass.
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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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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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At bottom, antipsychiatry is still psychiatry. And it doesn't really address itself to women's problems.
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The curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the individuals are joined in their weakness rather than in their strength -each asking from the other instead of finding pleasure in giving. It is even more deceptive to dream of gaining through the child a plenitude, a warmth, a value, which one is unable to create for oneself; the child brings joy only to the woman who is capable of disinterestedly desiring the happiness of another, to one who without being wrapped up in self seeks to transcend her own existence.
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There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.
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A day in which I don't write leaves a taste of ashes.
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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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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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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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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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There is only one good. And that is to act according to the dictates of one's conscience.
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No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.
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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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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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Let women be provided with living strength of their own.