Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
-
Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly.
-
There was a time, in the nineteenth century, for example, when women spoke mostly about the house, children, birth, and so forth, because it was their domain. That's changing a little, now.
-
What is very troubling is that people who have tried to write literature, even, for example, proletarian writers, seem to write within the norms of the dominant class.
-
I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth – and truth rewarded me.
-
Existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men.
-
Since it is the Other within us who is old, it is natural that the revelation of our age should come to us from outside --from others. We do not accept it willingly.
-
When Goya was 80 he drew an ancient man propped on two sticks, with a great mass of white hair and beard all over his face, and the inscription, "I am still learning."
-
There has to be a certain relationship between the life and the writing style, and that is really a problem.
-
But women do not say 'We', except at some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration; men say 'women', and women use the same word in referring to themselves.
-
Jealousy is not contemptible, real love has a beak and claws.
-
He reflected. 'I know a lot of different kids of people; what I want is to show each of them how the others really are. You hear so many lies!
-
I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.
-
Indeed, there is nothing more arbitrary than intervening as a stranger in a destiny which is not ours.
-
If you try consciously to be avant-garde, it's a little dangerous, like the present state of modern painting, where dealers try to be avant-garde, and under this pretext, painters take some old scraps and call it avant-garde.
-
At the moment of their emancipation, women have a need to write their own histories.
-
A couple who go on living together merely because that was how they began, without any other reason: was that what we were turning into?
-
It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.
-
All oppression creates a state of war.
-
I believe that we must use language. If it is used in a feminist perspective, with a feminist sensibility, language will find itself changed in a feminist manner. It will nonetheless be the language. You can't not use this universal instrument; you can't create an artificial language, in my opinion. But naturally, each writer must use it in his/her own way.
-
To be a woman, if not a defect, is at least a peculiarity.
-
Françoise could not help taking a surreptitious glance at Xavière: she gave a start of amazement. Xavière was no longer watching, her head was lowered. Françoise barely suppressed a scream. The girl was pressing the lighted end against her skin, a bitter smile curling her lips. It was an intimate, solitary smile, like that of a half-wit; the voluptuous, tortured smile of a woman possessed of some secret pleasure.
-
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.
-
Patience is one of those feminine qualities which have their origin in our oppression but should be preserved after our liberation.
-
The ballot box is a most inadequate mechanism of change.