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As Long As There Have Been Men And They Have Lived, They Have All Felt This Tragic Ambiguity Of Their Condition, But As Long As There Have Been Philosophers And They Have Thought, Most Of Them Have Tried To Mask It.

-Simone De Beauvoir

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As Long As There

Simone De Beauvoir

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As Long As There Have Been Men And They Have Lived, They Have All Felt This Tragic Ambiguity Of Their Condition, But As Long As There Have Been Philosophers And They Have Thought, Most Of Them Have Tried To Mask It.

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To Will Freedom And To Will To Disclose Being Are One And The Same Choice; Hence, Freedom Takes A Positive And Constructive Step Which Causes Being To Pass To Existence In A Movement Which Is Constantly Surpassed.

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.

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.

One Is Not Born, But Rather Becomes, A Woman.

He Reflected. 'i Know A Lot Of Different Kids Of People; What I Want Is To Show Each Of Them How The Others Really Are. You Hear So Many Lies!

I Could See No Reason For Being Sad. It´s Just That It Makes Me Unhappy Not To Feel Happy.

On Ne Na|"t Pas Femme: On Le Devient. One Is Not Born A Woman: One Becomes A Woman.

As Long As There Have Been Men And They Have Lived, They Have All Felt This Tragic Ambiguity Of Their Condition, But As Long As There Have Been Philosophers And They Have Thought, Most Of Them Have Tried To Mask It.

I Am Incapable Of Conceiving Infinity, And Yet I Do Not Accept Finity.

Regardless Of The Staggering Dimensions Of The World About Us, The Density Of Our Ignorance, The Risks Of Catastrophes To Come, And Our Individual Weakness Within The Immense Collectivity, The Fact Remains That We Are Absolutely Free Today If We Choose To Will Our Existence In Its Finiteness, A Finiteness Which Is Open On The Infinite. And In Fact, Any Man Who Has Known Real Loves, Real Revolts, Real Desires, And Real Will Knows Quite Well That He Has No Need Of Any Outside Guarantee To Be Sure Of His Goals; Their Certitude Comes From His Own Drive.

If I Were Proud Of Anything In My Life, It Would Be Of Our Love. I Feel We Have To Tell To Each Other As Many Things As We Can, So We Are Not Only Lovers, But The Closest Of Friends At The Same Time.

Few Tasks Are More Like The Torture Of Sisyphus Than Housework, With Its Endless Repetition: The Clean Becomes Soiled, The Soiled Is Made Clean, Over And Over, Day After Day.

To Create A Language All Of A Piece Which Would Be A Women's Language, That I Find Quite Insane. There Does Not Exist A Mathematics Which Is Only A Women's Mathematics, Or A Feminine Science.

Whether You Think Of It As Heavenly Or As Earthly, If You Love Life Immortality Is No Consolation For Death.

Anyway I Know Only Too Well That All Life Is Nothing But A Brief Reprieve From Death.

This Has Always Been A Man's World, And None Of The Reasons That Have Been Offered In Explanation Have Seemed Adequate.

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.

The Arrogance Of Some Christians Would Close Heaven To Them If, To Their Misfortune, It Existed.

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.

Living By Proxy Is Always A Precarious Expedient.

People Seem To Think That If You Keep Your Head Empty You Automatically Fill Your Balls.

Sometimes You Can Accept An Important Post, On Condition That It Really Puts You In A Position To Help Women. Unfortunately, Women Who Have Important Posts Very Often Adopt Masculine Standards-power, Ambition, Personal Success - And Cut Themselves Off From Other Women.

In The Face Of An Obstacle Which Is Impossible To Overcome, Stubbornness Is Stupid.

In Truth We Need To Change The Society Itself, Men As Well As Women, To Change Everything.

To Make Oneself An Object, To Make Oneself Passive, Is A Very Different Thing From Being A Passive Object.

Every Time I Start On A New Book, I Am A Beginner Again. I Doubt Myself, I Grow Discouraged, All The Work Accomplished In The Past Is As Though It Never Was, My First Drafts Are So Shapeless That It Seems Impossible To Go On With The Attempt At All, Right Up Until The Moment - Always Imperceptible, There, Too, There Is A Break - When It Is Has Become Impossible Not To Finish It.

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.

To Abstain From Politics Is In Itself A Political Attitude.

Every Time A Man Dies, A Child Dies Too, And An Adolescent And A Young Man As Well; Everyone Weeps For The One Who Was Dear To Him.

Can One Say That There Is A Way Of Crying Out, Of Speaking, Which Is Properly Feminine? Personally, I Don't Think So. In The End, I Find This Is Another Way Of Putting Women In A Kind Of Singularity, A Ghetto, Which Is Not What I Want. I Want Them To Be Singular And Universal At The Same Time.

From The Very Beginning, Existentialism Defined Itself As A Philosophy Of Ambiguity.

I Believe That We Must Use Language. If It Is Used In A Feminist Perspective, With A Feminist Sensibility, Language Will Find Itself Changed In A Feminist Manner. It Will Nonetheless Be The Language. You Can't Not Use This Universal Instrument; You Can't Create An Artificial Language, In My Opinion. But Naturally, Each Writer Must Use It In His/her Own Way.

It Is Not In Giving Life But In Risking Life That Man Is Raised Above The Animal; That Is Why Superiority Has Been Accorded In Humanity Not To The Sex That Brings Forth But To That Which Kills.

He Formed His Sentences Hesitantly And Then Threw Them At Me With Such Force That I Felt As If I Were Receiving A Present Each Time

I Willingly Trust Myself To Chance. I Let My Thoughts Wander, I Digress, Not Only Sitting At My Work, But All Day Long, All Night Even. It Often Happens That A Sentence Suddenly Runs Through My Head Before I Go To Bed, Or When I Am Unable To Sleep, And I Get Up Again And Write It Down.

I Think It's Wrong To Write In A Totally Esoteric Language When You Want To Talk About Things Which Interest A Multitude Of Women.

Retirement May Be Looked Upon Either As A Prolonged Holiday Or As A Rejection, A Being Thrown On To The Scrap-heap.

You Can't Address Yourself To Women By Speaking A Language Which No Average Woman Will Understand. In My Opinion, It's Wrong.

To Be Oneself, Simply Oneself, Is So Amazing And Utterly Unique An Experience That It's Hard To Convince Oneself So Singular A Thing Happens To Everybody.

To Lose Confidence In One’s Body Is To Lose Confidence In Oneself.

It Is Not The Inferiority Of Women That Has Caused Their Historical Insignificance; It Is Rather Their Historical Insignificance That Has Doomed Them To Inferiority.

Men Create Their Own Gods And Thus Have Some Slight Understanding That They Are Self-fabricated. Women Are Much More Susceptible, Because They Are Completely Oppressed By Men; They Take Men At Their Word And Believe In The Gods That Men Have Made Up. The Situation Of Women, Their Culture, Makes Them Kneel More Often Before The Gods That Have Been Created By Men Than Men Themselves Do, Who Know What They've Done. To This Extent, Women Will Be More Fanatical, Whether It Is For Fascism Or For Totalitarianism.

The Whole World Was Nothing But An Exile With No Hope Of A Return.

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.

All The Idols Made By Man, However Terrifying They May Be, Are In Point Of Fact Subordinate To Him, And That Is Why He Will Always Have It In His Power To Destroy Them.

To Be Moral Is To Discover Fundamentally Ones Own Being.

The Body Is Not A Thing, It Is A Situation: It Is Our Grasp On The World And Our Sketch Of Our Project

If You Try Consciously To Be Avant-garde, It's A Little Dangerous, Like The Present State Of Modern Painting, Where Dealers Try To Be Avant-garde, And Under This Pretext, Painters Take Some Old Scraps And Call It Avant-garde.

I Had Never Believed In The Sacred Nature Of Literature. God Had Died When I Was Fourteen.

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.

All The Opportunities You Let Slip By! The Idea, The Inspiration Just Doesn´t Come Fast Enough. Instead Of Being Open, You´re Closed Up Tight. That´s The Worst Sin Of All - The Sin Of Omission.

It Is For Man To Establish The Reign Of Liberty In The Midst Of The World Of The Given. To Gain The Supreme Victory, It Is Necessary, For One Thing, That By And Through Their Natural Differentiation Men And Women Unequivocally Affirm Their Brotherhood.

Literature In France Seems To Be Undergoing A Crisis Now, And Nothing Comes Immediately To Mind.

Youth And What The Italians So Prettily Call Stamina. The Vigor, The Fire, That Enables You To Love And Create. When You've Lost That, You've Lost Everything.

Lost Everything

Choice Springs From The Totality Of The Person. Thus, To Study, To Analyze What A Person Is, Does Not Eliminate The Idea Of Freedom.

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.

There's Something Tragic About You. Your Feeling For The Absolute. You Were Made To Believe In God And Spend Your Life In A Convent.' There Are Too Many With That Vocation. God Would Have Had To Love Only Me.

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.

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.

Representation Of The World, Like The World Itself, Is The Work Of Men; They Describe It From Their Own Point Of View, Which They Confuse With The Absolute Truth.

There Is Only One Solution If Old Age Is Not To Be An Absurd Parody Of Our Former Life, And That Is To Go On Pursuing Ends That Give Our Existence A Meaning.

Given Masculine Norms, It Is Clear That Women Are More Likely To Be Considered Crazy - I'm Not Saying To Be Crazy.

As Long As The Family And The Myth Of The Family ... Have Not Been Destroyed, Women Will Still Be Oppressed.

One Is Not Born, But Rather Becomes, A Woman. No Biological, Psychological, Or Economic Fate Determines The Figure That The Human Female Presents In Society; It Is Civilization As A Whole That Produces This Creature, Intermediate Between Male And Eunuch, Which Is Described As Feminine.

Science Condemns Itself To Failure When, Yielding To The Infatuation Of The Serious, It Aspires To Attain Being, To Contain It, And To Possess It; But It Finds Its Truth If It Considers Itself As A Free Engagement Of Thought In The Given, Aiming, At Each Discovery, Not At Fusion With The Thing, But At The Possibility Of New Discoveries; What The Mind Then Projects Is The Concrete Accomplishment Of Its Freedom.

In Fact, People Seem To Be Tired Of Fiction Now. There Are So Many Other Ways Of Exploring Humanity - By Ethnology, Psychoanalysis, And So On. It's A Little Boring To Make Up Stories. So Many People Think That It's Better To Be Very Close To Reality And To Recount One's Life As It Is Rather Than To Fictionalize, As They Say, That Is To Transpose, And Therefore To Cheat.

You Can't Define The Future. And In My Opinion, You Can't Define The Avant-garde.

Justice Can Never Be Done In The Midst Of Injustice.

Truthfully Speaking, Women Are Dangerous, Even Those Who Aren't Feminists, Because There Has Always Been A Women's Revolt. Only It Has Usually Translated Itself Into Solitary, Individualist, Disagreeable Manifestations - The Whole History Of The Taming Of The Shrew, The Woman-shrew. They Weren't Shrews Without Cause.

Insects Were Scurrying About In The Shade Cast By The Grass, And The Lawn Was A Huge Monotonous Forest Of Thousands Of Little Green Blades, All Equal, All Alike, Hiding The World From Each Other. Anguished, She Thought, "i Don't Want To Be Just Another Blade Of Grass."

Anger Or Revolt That Does Not Get Into The Muscles Remains A Figment Of The Imagination.

What Is An Adult? A Child Blown Up By Age.

It Is In The Knowledge Of The Genuine Conditions Of Our Lives That We Must Draw Our Strength To Live And Our Reasons For Living.

I Realized That Even If We Went On Talking Till Judgment Day, I Would Still Find The Time All Too Short.

I Was Struck By The Absence, Even Among Very Young Boys And Girls, Of Any Interior Motivation; They Were Incapable Of Thinking, Of Inventing, Of Imagining, Of Choosing, Of Deciding For Themselves; This Incapacity Was Expressed By Their Conformism; In Every Domain Of Life They Employed Only The Abstract Measure Of Money, Because They Were Unable To Trust To Their Own Judgment.

It Is True That Nothing Is Gained Without Something Being Lost: Everyone Knows That In Fulfilling Oneself One Necessarily Sacrifices Some Possibilities.

She Would Never Change, But One Day At The Touch Of A Fingertip She Would Fall To Dust.

Writing Is A Trade ... Which Is Learned By Writing.

Anais Nin Shows An Occasional Grace In Writing, But Her Work Is Quite Foreign To Me, Precisely Because She Wants So Much To Be Feminine And Not Feminist. And Then She Is So Gaga Before So Many Men. She Talks About Men I Know In France, Men Who Were Less Than Nothing, And She Considers Them Kings, Extraordinary People.

Sex Pleasure In Woman Is A Kind Of Magic Spell; It Demands Complete Abandon; If Words Or Movements Oppose The Magic Of Caresses, The Spell Is Broken.

Women's Mutual Understanding Comes From The Fact That They Identify Themselves With Each Other; But For The Same Reason Each Is Against The Others.

It Is Impossible To Do Anything For Anyone.

When Women Act Like Women, They Are Accused Of Being Inferior. When Women Act Like Human Beings, They Are Accused Of Behaving Like Men.

A Life Is Such A Strange Object, At One Moment Translucent, At Another Utterly Opaque, An Object I Make With My Own Hands, An Object Imposed On Me, An Object For Which The World Provides The Raw Material And Then Steals It From Me Again, Pulverized By Events, Scattered, Broken, Scored Yet Retaining Its Unity; How Heavy It Is And How Inconsistent: This Contradiction Breeds Many Misunderstandings.

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.

Only A Woman Can Write What It Is To Feel As A Woman, To Be A Woman.

It Must Be Said In Addition That The Men With The Most Scrupulous Respect For Embryonic Life Are Also Those Who Are Most Zealous When It Comes To Condemning Adults To Death In War.

The Characteristic Feature Of All Ethics Is To Consider Human Life As A Game That Can Be Won Or Lost And To Teach Man The Means Of Winning.

To Give Space When What One Most Yearns For Is Closeness, That Is Both The Great Test And Great Tragedy Of Love.

To Will Oneself Moral And To Will Oneself Free Are One And The Same Decision.

Old Age Was Growing Inside Me. It Kept Catching My Eye From The Depths Of The Mirror. I Was Paralyzed Sometimes As I Saw It Making Its Way Toward Me So Steadily When Nothing Inside Me Was Ready For It.

Today, However, We Are Having A Hard Time Living Because We Are So Bent On Outwitting Death.

Buying Is Profound Pleasure.

When Someone You Love Dies You Pay For The Sin Of Outliving Her With A Thousand Piercing Regrets.

On The Day When It Will Be Possible For Woman To Love Not In Her Weakness But In Her Strength, Not To Escape Herself But To Find Herself, Not To Abase Herself But To Assert Herself--on That Day Love Will Become For Her, As For Man, A Source Of Life And Not Of Mortal Danger.

Oppression Tries To Defend Itself By Its Utility.

One Is Not Conceived A Lady, One Turns Into One.

Why Does One Exist? That's Not My Problem. One Does Exist. The Thing To Do Is To Take No Notice But Go At It On The Run And To Keep On Going Right On Until You Die.

Tonight, Once More, Life Sinks Its Teeth Into My Heart.

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.

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.

Picasso Never Thought Of Himself As Avant-garde. I Just Find It A Bad Way To Think Of Yourself.

If Women Really Did Have Complete Equality With Men, Society Would Be Completely Overturned.

For Years I Thought My Work Still Lay Ahead, And Now I Find It Is Behind Me: There Was No Moment When It Took Place.

When Goya Was 80 He Drew An Ancient Man Propped On Two Sticks, With A Great Mass Of White Hair And Beard All Over His Face, And The Inscription, "i Am Still Learning."

There Is No Justification For Present Existence Other Than Its Expansion Into An Indefinitely Open Future.

Live With No Time-out.

I Am Too Intelligent, Too Demanding, And Too Resourceful For Anyone To Be Able To Take Charge Of Me Entirely. No One Knows Me Or Loves Me Completely. I Have Only Myself

Whatever The Country, Capitalist Or Socialist, Man Was Everywhere Crushed By Technology, Made A Stranger To His Own Work, Imprisoned, Forced Into Stupidity. The Evil All Arose From The Fact That He Had Increased His Needs Rather Than Limited Them; . . . As Long As Fresh Needs Continued To Be Created, So New Frustrations Would Come Into Being. When Had The Decline Begun? The Day Knowledge Was Preferred To Wisdom And Mere Usefulness To Beauty. . . . Only A Moral Revolution - Not A Social Or Political Revolution - Only A Moral Revolution Would Lead Man Back To His Lost Truth.

Feminism Is A Revolutionary Movement Which Is Different From The Class Struggle Movement, The Proletarian Movement, But Which Is A Movement Which Must Be Leftist. By That I Mean At The Extreme Left, A Movement Working To Overthrow The Whole Society.

--there You Are. The Sight Of The Changing World Is Miraculous And Heartbreaking, Both At The Same Time. --but So It Is For Me Too. The Heartbreaking Side Of Growing Old Is Not In The Things Around One But In Oneself.

A Freedom Which Is Interested Only In Denying Freedom Must Be Denied. And It Is Not True That The Recognition Of The Freedom Of Others Limits My Own Freedom: To Be Free Is Not To Have The Power To Do Anything You Like; It Is To Be Able To Surpass The Given Toward An Open Future; The Existence Of Others As A Freedom Defines My Situation And Is Even The Condition Of My Own Freedom. I Am Oppressed If I Am Thrown Into Prison, But Not If I Am Kept From Throwing My Neighbor Into Prison.

It Is So Difficult Not To Become Vain About One's Own Good Luck.

One's Life Has Value So Long As One Attributes Value To The Life Of Others, By Means Of Love, Friendship, Indignation And Compassion.

If The Writer Is A Woman, Feminist Or Not, It Will Give The Language Something That It Would Not Have If It Had Been Used By A Man.

She Was Trying To Get Rid Of A Religious Hangover.

That A Whole Part Of The Middle Class Detests Me... Is Utterly Normal. I Would Be Troubled If The Contrary Were True.

Patience Is One Of Those Feminine Qualities Which Have Their Origin In Our Oppression But Should Be Preserved After Our Liberation.

There Is Something False In This Search For A Purely Feminine Writing Style. Language, Such As It Is, Is Inherited From A Masculine Society, And It Contains Many Male Prejudices. We Must Rid Language Of All That. Still, A Language Is Not Something Created Artificially; The Proletariat Can't Use A Different Language From The Bourgeoisie, Even If They Use It Differently, Even If From Time To Time They Invent Something, Technical Words Or Even A Kind Of Worker's Slang, Which Can Be Very Beautiful And Very Rich. Women Can Do That As Well, Enrich Their Language, Clean It Up.

Since It Is The Other Within Us Who Is Old, It Is Natural That The Revelation Of Our Age Should Come To Us From Outside --from Others. We Do Not Accept It Willingly.

The Past Is Not A Peaceful Landscape Lying There Behind Me, A Country In Which I Can Stroll Wherever I Please, And Will Gradually Show Me All Its Secret Hills And Dales. As I Was Moving Forward, So It Was Crumbling. Most Of The Wreckage That Can Be Seen Is Colourless, Distorted, Frozen: Its Meaning Escapes Me... All That's Left Is A Skeleton. I Shall Never Find My Plans Again, My Hopes And Fears - I Shall Not Find Myself.

Work Almost Always Has A Double Aspect: It Is A Bondage, A Wearisome Drudgery; But It Is Also A Source Of Interest, A Steadying Element, A Factor That Helps To Integrate The Worker With Society. Retirement May Be Looked Upon Either As A Prolonged Holiday Or As A Rejection, A Being Thrown On To The Scrap-heap.

Women Aren't More Easily Swayed By Fascism Than Men, But I Believe That Their Situation Makes Them In Effect More Slavish Than Men.

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.

Heterosexuality Is

In A Way, Literature Is True Than Life,' He Said To Himself. 'on Paper, You Say Exactly And Completely What You Feel. How Easy It Is To Break Things Off On Paper! You Hate, You Shout, You Kill, You Commit Suicide; You Carry Things To The Very End. And That's Why It's False. But It's Damned Satisfying. In Life, You're Constantly Denying Yourself, And Others Are Always Contradicting You. On Paper, I Make Time Stand Still And I Impose My Convictions On The Whole World; They Become The Only Reality.

On The Evenings When My Parents Held Parties, The Drawing-room Mirrors Multiplied To Infinity The Scintillations Of A Crystal Chandelier. Mama Would Take Her Seat At The Grand Piano To Accompany A Lady Dressed In A Cloud Of Tulle Who Played The Violin And A Cousin Who Performed On A Cello. I Would Crack Between My Teeth The Candied Shell Of An Artificial Fruit, And A Burst Of Light Would Illuminate My Palate With A Taste Of Blackcurrant Or Pineapple: All The Colours, All The Lights Were Mine, The Gauzy Scarves, The Diamonds, The Laces; I Held The Whole Party In My Mouth.

Indeed, There Is Nothing More Arbitrary Than Intervening As A Stranger In A Destiny Which Is Not Ours.

Society, Being Codified By Man, Decrees That Woman Is Inferior; She Can Do Away With This Inferiority Only By Destroying The Male's Superiority.

I Was Made For Another Planet Altogether. I Mistook The Way.

I Think That Freud Understood Absolutely Nothing About Women - As He Himself Said.

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.

Si L'on Vit Assez Longtemps, On Voit Que Toute Victoire Se Change Un Jour En De Faite. If You Live Long Enough, You'll Find That Every Victory Turns Into A Defeat.

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.

... To Adapt One's Outlook To Another Person's Salvation Is The Surest And Quickest Way Of Losing Him.

Legislators, Priests, Philosophers, Writers, Ans Scientists Have Striven To Show That The Subordinate Position Of Woman Is Willed In Heaven And Advantageous On Earth.

To Refuse Everything, To Say, Even When There Is Something Which Really Should Be Done, "ah, That's No Longer Feminist," Is A Pessimistic, Even Masochistic Tendency In Women, The Result Of Having Been Habituated To Inertia, To Pessimism.

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.

Society Cares For The Individual Only So Far As He Is Profitable.

To Be Free Is Not To Have The Power To Do Anything You Like; It Is To Be Able To Surpass The Given Toward An Open Future.

Fathers Never Have Exactly The Daughters They Want Because They Invent A Notion A Them That The Daughters Have To Conform To.

The Time That One Gains Cannot Be Accumulated In A Storehouse; It Is Contradictory To Want To Save Up Existence, Which, The Fact Is, Exists Only By Being Spent And There Is A Good Case For Showing That Airplanes, Machines, The Telephone, And The Radio Do Not Make Men Of Today Happier Than Those Of Former Times.

But I Must Admit I Didn´t Like That Idea; Do The Same Thing As Everyone Else. Eating To Live, Living To Eat - That Had Been The Nightmare Of My Adolescence. If It Meant Going Back To That, If Would Be Just As Well To Turn On The Gas At Once. But I Suppose Everyone Thinks Of Things Like That: Let´s Turn On The Gas At Once. And You Don´t Turn It On.

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.

There Are So Many Problems. Women Can Go To Work On These As Well Without Giving Up Their Feminism.

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.

I Take On A Shape And An Existence Only If I First Throw Myself Into The World By Loving, By Doing.

My Life Was Hurrying, Racing Tragically Toward Its End. And Yet At The Same Time It Was Dripping So Slowly, So Very Slowly Now, Hour By Hour, Minute By Minute. One Always Has To Wait Until The Sugar Melts, The Memory Dies, The Wound Scars Over, The Sun Sets, The Unhappiness Lifts And Fades Away.

Self-knowledge Is No Guarantee Of Happiness, But It Is On The Side Of Happiness And Can Supply The Courage To Fight For It.

If The Unconscious Must Express Itself It Will Do So Through The Work That You Do Consciously Or Subconsciously, With Words, With What You Have To Say.

The Father's Life Is Surrounded By Mysterious Prestige: The Hours He Spends In The Home, The Room Where He Works, The Objects Around Him, His Occupations, His Habits, Have A Sacred Character. It Is He Who Feeds The Family, Is The One In Charge And The Head. Usually He Works Outside The Home, And It Is Through Him That The Household Communicates With The Rest Of The World: He Is The Embodiment Of This Adventurous, Immense, Difficult, And Marvelous World; He Is Transcendence, He Is God.

The Writer Of Originality, Unless Dead, Is Always Shocking, Scandalous; Novelty Disturbs And Repels.

One Is Not Born A Genius, One Becomes A Genius; And The Feminine Situation Has Up To The Present Rendered This Becoming Practically Impossible.

Feminism Is One Way Of Attacking Society As It Now Exists.

The Human Species Is Forever In A State Of Change, Forever Becoming.

The Day Knowledge Was Preferred To Wisdom And Mere Usefulness To Beauty. . . . Only A Moral Revolution -- Not A Social Or A Political Revolution -- Only A Moral Revolution Would Lead Man Back To His Lost Truth.

Political Revolution

Few Books Are More Thrilling Than Certain Confessions, But They Must Be Honest, And The Author Must Have Something To Confess.

In Order To Be An Artist, One Must Be Deeply Rooted In The Society.

Man Is A Talking Animal And He Will Always Let Himself Be Swayed By The Power Of The Word. Machines Won't Change Human Nature.

In Every Society The Artist Or Writer Remains An Outsider.

Art Is An Attempt To Integrate Evil.

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.

Hegel Held That The Two Sexes Were Of Necessity Different, The One Being Active And The Other Passive, And Of Course The Female Would Be The Passive One.

There Are Moments When You Have To Write Certain Things And You Don't Have To Think Of Your Sex. If You Are Writing About The Population Of The Thirteenth District In Paris, Even If You Are Writing On The Women In The Thirteenth District, There's No Need To Consider Your Sex.

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.

Because We Are Separated Everything Separates Us, Even Our Efforts To Join Each Other.

The Most Sympathetic Of Men Never Fully Comprehend Woman's Concrete Situation.

Buying Is A Profound Pleasure.

Literature Is Born When Something In Life Goes Slightly Adrift.

To Catch A Husband Is An Art; To Hold Him Is A Job.

Between Women Love Is Contemplative; Caresses Are Intended Less To Gain Possession Of The Other Than Gradually To Re-create The Self Through Her; Separateness Is Abolished, There Is No Struggle, No Victory, No Defeat; In Exact Reciprocity Each Is At Once Subject And Object, Sovereign And Slave; Duality Become Mutuality.

The Knight Departing For New Adventures Offends His Lady, Yet She Has Nothing But Contempt For Him If He Remains At Her Feet.

One Day I'll Be Old, Dead, Forgotten. And At This Very Moment, While I'm Sitting Here Thinking These Things, A Man In A Dingy Hotel Room Is Thinking, "i Will Always Be Here."

One Can Hardly Tell Women That Washing Up Saucepans Is Their Divine Mission, [so] They Are Told That Bringing Up Children Is Their Divine Mission. But The Way Things Are In The World, Bringing Up Children Has A Great Deal In Common With Washing Up Saucepans.

I Don't Want To Be Just Another Blade Of Grass.

Society Cares About The Individual Only In So Far As He Is Profitable. The Young Know This. Their Anxiety As They Enter In Upon Social Life Matches The Anguish Of The Old As They Are Excluded From It.

Sometimes Speech Is No More Than A Device For Saying Nothing - And A Neater One Than Silence.

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.

There Is A Poetry In Making Preserves; The Housewife Has Caught Duration In The Snare Of Sugar, She Has Enclosed Life In Jars.

Let Women Be Provided With Living Strength Of Their Own. Let Them Have The Means To Attack The World And Wrest From It Their Own Subsistence, And Their Dependence Will Be Abolished -- That Of Man Also.

Life Is Occupied In Both Perpetuating Itself And In Surpassing Itself; If All It Does Is Maintain Itself, Then Living Is Only Not Dying.

Christian Ideology Has Contributed No Little To The Oppression Of Woman.

I Have Never Read A Really Good Novel Written By A Man Where Women Are Portrayed As They Truly Are. They Can Be Portrayed Externally Very Well - Stendhal's Madame De Renal, For Example - But Only As Seen From The Outside.

I Think That Feminism Permits Women To Speak Among Themselves, Instead Of Simply Being Resentful, Having Personal Complaints, Which Get Them Nowhere And Which Make Them Sick And Ill-tempered, Depressive And Poison The Lives Of Their Husbands And Children. It's Much Better To Arrive At A Collective Consciousness Of This Problem, Which Is Both A Kind Of Therapy And The Basis For A Struggle.

Literature Is Always What The Dominant Ideology Recognizes As Literature.

The State Of Emotional Intoxication Allows One To Grasp Existence In One's Self And In The Other, As Both Subjectivity And Passivity. The Two Partners Merge In This Ambiguous Unity; Each One Is Freed Of His Own Presence And Achieves Immediate Communication With The Other.

The Curse Which Lies Upon Marriage Is That Too Often The Individuals Are Joined In Their Weakness Rather Than In Their Strength - Each Asking From The Other Instead Of Finding Pleasure In Giving.

If The Feminine Issue Is So Absurd, Is Because The Male's Arrogance Made It "a Discussion

Whatever The Country, Capitalist Or Socialist, Man Was Everywhere Crushed By Technology, Made A Stranger To His Own Work, Imprisoned, Forced Into Stupidity.

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.

There Is Only One Good. And That Is To Act According To The Dictates Of One's Conscience.

The Torment That So Many Young Women Know, Bound Hand And Foot By Love And Motherhood, Without Having Forgotten Their Former Dreams.

Why One Man Rather Than Another? It Was Odd. You Find Yourself Involved With A Fellow For Life Just Because He Was The One That You Met When You Were Nineteen.

Finding Yourself

This Is Certainly A Very Tricky Point: How To Ally Yourself To Other Leftist Forces Without Losing Your Feminist Specificity.

At The Moment Of Their Emancipation, Women Have A Need To Write Their Own Histories.

It Is Perfectly Natural For The Future Woman To Feel Indignant At The Limitations Posed Upon Her By Her Sex. The Real Question Is Not Why She Should Reject Them: The Problem Is Rather To Understand Why She Accepts Them.

Perfectly Natural

The Curse Which Lies Upon Marriage Is That Too Often The Individuals Are Joined In Their Weakness Rather Than In Their Strength -each Asking From The Other Instead Of Finding Pleasure In Giving. It Is Even More Deceptive To Dream Of Gaining Through The Child A Plenitude, A Warmth, A Value, Which One Is Unable To Create For Oneself; The Child Brings Joy Only To The Woman Who Is Capable Of Disinterestedly Desiring The Happiness Of Another, To One Who Without Being Wrapped Up In Self Seeks To Transcend Her Own Existence.

You Have To Start From Where You Are Today And From What Can Be Done.

A Man Would Never Get The Notion Of Writing A Book On The Peculiar Situation Of The Human Male.

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.

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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Alexandra Fuller

Pedro Calderon De La Barca

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