Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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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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Choice springs from the totality of the person. Thus, to study, to analyze what a person is, does not eliminate the idea of freedom.
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Society turns away from the aged worker as though he belonged to another species. That is why the whole question is buried in a conspiracy of silence. Old age exposes the failure of our entire civilization.
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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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The day had been spent in the expectation of these hours, and now they were crumbling away, becoming, in their turn, another period of expectancy...It was a journey without end, leading to an indefinite future, eternally shifting just as she was reaching the present.
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Few books are more thrilling than certain confessions, but they must be honest, and the author must have something to confess.
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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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If the feminine issue is so absurd, is because the male's arrogance made it "a discussion.
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Old age is better for women than for men. First of all, they have less far to fall, since their lives are more mediocre than those of most men.
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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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History is a great cemetery: men, deeds, ideas are always dying as soon as they are born.
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I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. I can not appropriate the snow field where i slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession. I experience it as a triumph, not as a defeat.
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People seem to think that if you keep your head empty you automatically fill your balls.
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My worst mistake has been not grasping that time goes by. It was going by and there I was, set in the attitude of the ideal wife of an ideal husband. Instead of bringing our sexual relationship to life again I brooded happily over memories of our former nights together.
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It's frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself. It seems unfair. You can't assume the responsibility for everything you do --or don't do.
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Dwelling-place and food are useful for life but give it no significance: the immediate goals of the housekeeper are only means, not true ends.
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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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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.
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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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We can reorient science - for example, a kind of medicine much more directed toward the enormous number of women's health problems which are neglected now. But the original givens of this science are the same for men and for women. Women simply have to steal the instrument; they don't have to break it, or try, a priori, to make of it something totally different. Steal it and use it for their own good.
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The way I approached a question, my habit of mind, the way I looked at things, what I took for granted - all this was myself and it did not seem to me that I could alter it.
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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.
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A Darwinian nation of economic fitness abhors idleness, dependence, non-productivity.
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Sign of old age: distress at all leave-takings, all separations. And the sadness of memories, because I'm aware they're condemned to death.