Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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Women aren't more easily swayed by fascism than men, but I believe that their situation makes them in effect more slavish than men.
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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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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.
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I think that where you go wrong is that you imagine that your reasons for living ought to fall on you, ready-made from heaven, whereas we have to find them for ourselves.
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She would never change, but one day at the touch of a fingertip she would fall to dust.
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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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In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid.
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History is a great cemetery: men, deeds, ideas are always dying as soon as they are born.
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That is what chills your spine when you read an account of a suicide: not the frail corpse hanging from the window bars but what happened inside that heart immediately before.
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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.
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I am not at all for a feminism which is entirely separatist, which would say, "this domain is purely for women." I don't believe that at all.
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Even if one is neither vain nor self-obsessed, it is so extraordinary to be oneself - exactly oneself and no one else - and so unique, that it seems natural that one should also be unique for someone else.
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Indeed, there is nothing more arbitrary than intervening as a stranger in a destiny which is not ours.
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All oppression creates a state of war.
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A Darwinian nation of economic fitness abhors idleness, dependence, non-productivity.
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It is a difficult matter for man to realize the extreme importance of social discriminations which seem outwardly insignificant but which produce in woman moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to spring from her original nature.
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The earthly meaning of eternal life was death, and she refused to die.
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She offered her mouth to him, as if enchanted. A Persian princess, a little Indian, a fox, a morning glory, a lovely wisteria--it always pleased them when you told them they looked like something, like something else.
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There has to be a certain relationship between the life and the writing style, and that is really a problem.
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The Communists, following Hegel, speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion.
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It's true that what you find in New York is something other than America. Only small towns and small countries are self-satisfied; a real capital goes beyond its borders.
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Justice can never be done in the midst of injustice.
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All success cloaks a surrender.
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Obviously, everything has always been defined by the dominant ideology. But the dominant ideology has been able to accept women's literature as well as men's literature. I would say that women have been hindered from creating for a variety of reasons, as Virginia Woolf so admirably explained in A Room of One's Own. When they have created, on the whole they have been recognized. In literature it hasn't been nearly as oppressive as in, say, painting, where even the existence of so many women painters has always been denied.