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I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.
Simone de Beauvoir -
It is in great part the anxiety of being a woman that devastates the feminine body.
Simone de Beauvoir
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One is not conceived a lady, one turns into one.
Simone de Beauvoir -
One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.
Simone de Beauvoir -
The writer can't stop her unconscious from showing up, that's certain.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me.
Simone de Beauvoir -
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.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms. For each of them, love would be the revelation of the self through the gift of the self and the enrichment of the universe.
Simone de Beauvoir
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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.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Let women be provided with living strength of their own.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Tragedies are all right for a while: you are concerned, you are curious, you feel good. And then it gets repetitive, it doesn't advance, it grows dreadfully boring: it is so very boring, even for me.
Simone de Beauvoir -
The nearer I come to the end of my days, the more I am enabled to see that strange thing, a life, and to see it whole.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Therefore the misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his freedom was first concealed from him and that all his life he will be nostalgic for the time when he did not know it's exigencies.
Simone de Beauvoir -
To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.
Simone de Beauvoir
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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.
Simone de Beauvoir -
This has always been a man's world, and none of the reasons that have been offered in explanation have seemed adequate.
Simone de Beauvoir -
The individual is defined only by his relationship to the world and to other individuals; he exists only by transcending himself, and his freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of others. He justifies his existence by a movement which, like freedom, springs from his heart but which leads outside of himself.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Cooking is revolution and creation.
Simone de Beauvoir -
The earthly meaning of eternal life was death, and she refused to die.
Simone de Beauvoir -
To be feminist doesn't mean simply to do nothing, to reduce yourself to total impotence under the pretext of refusing masculine values. There is a problematic, a very difficult dialectic between accepting power and refusing it, accepting certain masculine values, and wanting to transform them. I think it's worth a try.
Simone de Beauvoir
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I like everyone who tries to show that madness is, in large part, conditioned by society and particularly by the family, and therefore, strongly affects women.
Simone de Beauvoir -
We must not confuse the present with the past. With regard to the past, no further action is possible.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Woman is determined not by her hormones or by mysterious instincts, but by the manner in which her body and her relation to the world are modified through the action of others than herself.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself.
Simone de Beauvoir