Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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The younger and healthier a woman is and the more her new and glossy body seems destined for eternal freshness, the less useful is artifice; but the carnal weakness of this prey that man takes and its ominous deterioration always have to be hidden from him...In any case, the more traits and proportions of a woman seem contrived, the more she delighted the heart of man because she seemed to escape the metamorphosis of natural things. The result is this strange paradox that by desiring to grasp nature, but transfigured, in woman, man destines her to artifice.
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It's only arrogance if you're wrong.
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Ce n'est gue' re que dans les asiles que les coquettes gardent avec ente" tement une foi entie' re en des regards absents; normalement, elles re clament des te moins. Women fond of dress are hardly ever entirely satisfied not to be seen, except among the insane; usually they want witnesses.
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I consider it almost antifeminist to say that there is a feminine nature which expresses itself differently, that a woman speaks her body more than a man, because after all, men also speak their bodies when they write. Everything is implicated in the work of a writer.
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Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself.
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At the moment of their emancipation, women have a need to write their own histories.
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The misfortune is that although everyone must come to death, each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her.
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The ideal of happiness has always taken material form in the house, whether cottage or castle; it stands for permanence and separation from the world.
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Live with no time-out.
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In 1949, I believed that social progress, the triumph of the proletariat, socialism would lead to the emancipation of women. But I saw that nothing came of it: first of all, that socialism was not achieved anywhere, and that in certain countries which called themselves socialist, the situation of women was no better than it was in so-called capitalist countries.
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Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility.
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Two separate beings, in different circumstances, face to face in freedom and seeking justification of their existence through one another, will always live an adventure full of risk and promise.
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It's important that you think of your relationship with the world and the way you can express that world and that you not be stopped if it scandalizes or embarrasses; but you must not look for scandal or for the avant-garde as a thing in itself.
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Literature is always what the dominant ideology recognizes as literature.
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However gifted an individual is at the outset, if his or her talents cannot be developed because of his or her social condition, because of the surrounding circumstances, these talents will be still-born.
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I realized that even if we went on talking till Judgment Day, I would still find the time all too short.
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Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction.
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From one minute to the next the present is merely an honorary past. It must be filled unceasingly anew to dissemble the curse it carries within itself; that is why Americans like speed, alcohol, thriller films and any sensational news: the demand for new things, and ever newer things, is feverish since nowhere will they rest.
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Habit has a kind of poetry.
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I admire Freud a great deal as a person and thinker. Despite everything, I find his work very, very rich, but I think that for women he has been absolutely disastrous. And even more so, everyone who came after him.
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Each person has his or her own very particular history and after all, the unconscious is the most secret part of ourselves.
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Marriage is a career which brings about more benefits than many others.
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They Americans want to believe that Good and Evil can be defined in precise categories, that Good is already, or will be easily achieved. ... if this optimism appears too superficial, they will try to create a kind of anti-God: the U.S.S.R. That is Evil, and it only needs to be annihilated to re-establish the reign of Good.
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Jealousy is not contemptible, real love has a beak and claws.