Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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Picasso never thought of himself as avant-garde. I just find it a bad way to think of yourself.
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If you are writing something in which you are really involved, you don't even need to think about it any longer. The situation itself demands your total commitment as an individual, just as in your political commitments.
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It is not mere chance that makes families speak of a child who is 'extraordinary for his age' and also of an old man who is 'extraordinary for his age'; the extraordinariness lies in their behaving like human beings when they are either not yet or no longer men.
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Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility.
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It's so easy to be mistaken about the future. Sometimes there are avant-gardes which believe themselves to be the avant-garde and which later find themselves to be absolutely dated.
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It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time.
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A man attaches himself to woman -- not to enjoy her, but to enjoy himself.
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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.
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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.
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I could see no reason for being sad. It´s just that it makes me unhappy not to feel happy.
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There are cases where the slave does not know his servitude and where it is necessary to bring the seed of his liberation to him from the outside: his submission is not enough to justify the tyranny which is imposed upon him.
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When we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy it implies, then the "division" of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.
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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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I never thought of myself as being in the avant-garde. I said what I had to say, as I was able to say it.
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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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Justice can never be done in the midst of injustice.
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Woman has always been man's dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shaped the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change.
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You can't address yourself to women by speaking a language which no average woman will understand. In my opinion, it's wrong.
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I went to get a detective story. You have to kill time. But time will kill me too - and there´s the true, preestablished balance.
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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.
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In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation.
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There are so many problems. Women can go to work on these as well without giving up their feminism.
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Many things would be changed for Americans if they would only admit that there is ill-luck in this world and that misfortune is not a priori a crime.
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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.