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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.

-Simone De Beauvoir

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I Willingly Trust Myself

Simone De Beauvoir

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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.

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A Writer Is Hoisted Up Onto A Pedestal Only To Scrutinize Him More Closely And Conclude That It Was A Mistake To Put Him Up There In The First Place.

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.

However Gifted An Individual Is At The Outset, If His Or Her Talents Cannot Be Developed Because Of His Or Her Social Condition, Because Of The Surrounding Circumstances, These Talents Will Be Still-born.

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.

Self-consciousness Is Not Knowledge But A Story One Tells About Oneself.

If You Haven't Been Happy Very Young, You Can Still Be Happy Later On, But It's Much Harder. You Need More Luck.

I Would Certainly Like To See Some Young Women Take Up Psychoanalysis Seriously And Reconstruct It From An Absolutely New Viewpoint.

Woman Is Shut Up In A Kitchen Or In A Boudoir, And Astonishment Is Expressed That Her Horizon Is Limited. Her Wings Are Clipped, And It Is Found Deplorable That She Cannot Fly.

Marriage Is Traditionally The Destiny Offered To Women By Society. Most Women Are Married Or Have Been, Or Plan To Be Or Suffer From Not Being.

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

…but All Day Long I Would Be Training Myself To Think, To Understand, To Criticize, To Know Myself; I Was Seeking For The Absolute Truth: This Preoccupation Did Not Exactly Encourage Polite Conversation.

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.

There Is Not A Single Line In This Diary That Does Not Call For A Correction Or A Denial...yes: Throughout These Pages I Meant What I Was Writing And I Meant The Opposite; Reading Them Again I Feel Completely Lost...i Was Lying To Myself. How I Lied To Myself!

No One Is More Arrogant Toward Women, More Aggressive Or Scornful, Than The Man Who Is Anxious About His Virility.

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.

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.

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

I'm Not Against Mothers. I Am Against The Ideology Which Expects Every Woman To Have Children, And I'm Against The Circumstances Under Which Mothers Have To Have Their Children.

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.

Let Women Be Provided With Living Strength Of Their Own.

There Has To Be A Certain Relationship Between The Life And The Writing Style, And That Is Really A Problem.

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.

Capabilities Are Clearly Manifested Only When They Have Been Realized.

The Ideal Of Happiness Has Always Taken Material Form In The House, Whether Cottage Or Castle; It Stands For Permanence And Separation From The World.

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

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.

Immortality Is A Terrible Curse.

Every War, Every Revolution, Demands The Sacrifice Of A Generation, Of A Collectivity, By Those Who Undertake It.

Marriage Is A Career Which Brings About More Benefits Than Many Others.

The Fact That We Are Human Beings Is Infinitely More Important Than All The Peculiarities That Distinguish Human Beings From One Another.

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.

Oppression Tries To Defend Itself By Its Utility.

The Renewed Use Of Lobotomy Today Is Particularly Applicable To Women: Because They Do Routine Things, It Is Possible To Take Away Their Spirit Of Revolt, Of Debate, Of Criticism, And Still Leave Them Perfectly Capable Of Making Stews Or Washing Dishes. It's Terrible, This Tendency To Consider Women Something Dangerous To Society.

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.

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

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."

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.

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.

Christianity Gave Eroticism Its Savor Of Sin And Legend When It Endowed The Human Female With A Soul.

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.

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

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

Most Feminists In France Came To Feminism After '68 As A Result Of The Hypocrisy They Experienced In Leftist Movements. In These Movements, Where Everyone Believed There Was Going To Be True Equality, Fraternity Between Men And Women, And That Together They Were Going To Struggle Against This Rotten Society, Even There They Noticed That The Leftists, The Militants, Kept Them "in Their Place." Women Made The Coffee While The Others Did The Talking; They Were The Ones Who Typed The Letters.

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

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.

She Was Ready To Deny The Existence Of Space And Time Rather Than Admit That Love Might Not Be Eternal.

There Is Something In The New York Air That Makes Sleep Useless.

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.

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

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

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

The Writer Can't Stop Her Unconscious From Showing Up, That's Certain.

Man Is Defined As A Human Being And A Woman As A Female - Whenever She Behaves As A Human Being She Is Said To Imitate The Male.

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

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.

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.

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.

It Is Impossible To Do Anything For Anyone.

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.

There Is The Problem Of Unpaid Labor, Such As Housework, Which Represents Millions And Millions Of Unsalaried Work Hours And On Which Masculine Society Is Firmly Based. To Put An End To This Would Be To Send The Present-day Capitalist System Flying In A Single Blow. Only We Can't Do It By Ourselves; There Have To Be Other Kinds Of Attacks On The System. So A Certain Alliance With Revolutionary Systems Is Necessary, Even Masculine Ones.

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

Literature Is Always What The Dominant Ideology Recognizes As Literature.

Love And Action Always Imply A Failure, But This Failure Must Not Keep Us From Loving And Acting. For We Have Not Only To Establish What Our Situation Is, We Have To Choose It In The Very Heart Of Its Ambiguity.

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.

The Most Mediocre Of Males Feels Himself A Demigod As Compared With Women.

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.

Harmony Between Two Individuals Is Never Granted-it Has To Be Conquered Indefinitely.

Be Loved, Be Admired, Be Necessary; Be Somebody.

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

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

I Was Very Fond Of Lagneau’s Phrase: “i Have No Comfort But In My Absolute Despair.

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.

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.

The Earthly Meaning Of Eternal Life Was Death, And She Refused To Die.

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.

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

Literature Takes Its Revenge On Reality By Making It The Slave Of Fiction.

I Tore Myself Away From The Safe Comfort Of Certainties Through My Love For Truth - And Truth Rewarded Me.

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

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

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

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.

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.

She Was Trying To Get Rid Of A Religious Hangover.

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.

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

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

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.

One Can Not Start By Saying That Our Earthly Destiny Has Or Has Not Importance, For It Depends Upon Us To Give It Importance.

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

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

Cooking Is Revolution And Creation.

The Point Is Not For Women Simply To Take Power Out Of Men’s Hands, Since That Wouldn’t Change Anything About The World. It’s A Question Precisely Of Destroying That Notion Of Power.

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.

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.

To Show Your True Ability Is Always, In A Sense, To Surpass The Limits Of Your Ability, To Go A Little Beyond Them: To Dare, To Seek, To Invent; It Is At Such A Moment That New Talents Are Revealed, Discovered, And Realized

Existentialism Does Not Offer To The Reader The Consolations Of An Abstract Evasion: Existentialism Proposes No Evasion. On The Contrary, Its Ethics Is Experienced In The Truth Of Life, And It Then Appears As The Only Proposition Of Salvation Which One Can Address To Men.

Buying Is A Profound Pleasure.

A Man Is In The Right In Being A Man; It Is The Woman Who Is In The Wrong.

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

No Existence Can Be Validly Fulfilled If It Is Limited To Itself.

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

A Man Attaches Himself To Woman -- Not To Enjoy Her, But To Enjoy Himself.

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.

It's True That This Is One Of The Problems Which Often Arises Among My Radical, Revolutionary Feminist Friends: Do You Have To Join The System Or Not? On The One Hand, If You Don't, You Risk Being Ineffectual. But If You Do, From That Moment On, You Place Your Feminism At The Service Of A System Which You Want To Take Apart.

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.

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

Eating, Sleeping, Cleaning - The Years No Longer Rise Up Toward Heaven, They Lie Spread Out Ahead, Gray And Identical. The Battle Against Dust And Dirt Is Never Won. Washing, Ironing, Sweeping, Ferreting Out Rolls Of Lint From Under Wardrobes - All This Halting Of Decay Is Also The Denial Of Life; For Time Simultaneously Creates And Destroys, And Only Its Negative Aspect Concerns The Housekeeper.

Old Age Is Life's Parody.

When I Was A Child, When I Was An Adolescent, Books Saved Me From Despair: That Convinced Me That Culture Was The Highest Of Values[...].

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.

I Discovered Feminism Around 1970-72-precisely The Time When Feminism Began To Exist In France. Before That, There Was No Feminism.

I Think That The Second Sex Will Seem An Old, Dated Book, After A While. But Nonetheless, A Book Which Will Have Made Its Contribution. At Least, I Hope So.

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

Existence Must Be Asserted In The Present If One Does Not Want All Life To Be Defined As An Escape Toward Nothingness.

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

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

I've Always Been Keenly Aware Of The Passing Of Time. I've Always Thought That I Was Old. Even When I Was Twelve, I Thought It Was Awful To Be Thirty. I Felt That Something Was Lost. At The Same Time, I Was Aware Of What I Could Gain, And Certain Periods Of My Life Have Taught Me A Great Deal. But, In Spite Of Everything, I've Always Been Haunted By The Passing Of Time And By The Fact That Death Keeps Closing In On Us.

Change Your Life Today. Don't Gamble On The Future, Act Now, Without Delay.

Inspirational Life

Justice Can Never Be Done In The Midst Of Injustice.

Living By Proxy Is Always A Precarious Expedient.

...counselling Man To Treat Her As A Slave While Persuading Her That She Is A Queen.

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.

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."

La Femme?sait Que Quand On La Regarde On Ne La Distingue Pas De Son Apparence: Elle Est Juge E, Respecte E, De Sire E A' Travers Sa Toilette. Woman?knows That When She Is Looked At She Is Not Considered Apart From Her Appearance: She Is Judged, Respected, Desired, By And Through Her Toilette.

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."

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

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

To Emancipate Woman Is To Refuse To Confine Her To The Relations She Bears To Man, Not To Deny Them To Her; Let Her Have Her Independent Existence And She Will Continue Nonetheless To Exist For Him Also: Mutually Recognising Each Other As Subject, Each Will Yet Remain For The Other An Other...when We Abolish The Slavery Of Half Of Humanity, Together With The Whole System Of Hypocrisy That It Implies, Then The 'division' Of Humanity Will Reveal Its Genuine Significance And The Human Couple Will Find Its True Form.

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

Live With No Time-out.

Jealousy Is Not Contemptible, Real Love Has A Beak And Claws.

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

I Would Stand Transfixed Before The Windows Of The Confectioners' Shops, Fascinated By The Luminous Sparkle Of Candied Fruits, The Cloudy Lustre Of Jellies, The Kaleidoscope Inflorescence Of Acidulated Fruit Drops - Red, Green, Orange, Violet: I Coveted The Colours Themselves As Much As The Pleasure They Promised Me.

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.

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.

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

Habit Has A Kind Of Poetry.

The Individuals Who Seem To Us Most Outstanding, Who Are Honored With The Name Of Genius, Are Those Who Have Proposed To Enact The Fate Of All Humanity In Their Personal Existences.

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

There Are Topics Which Are Common To Men And Women. I Think That If A Woman Speaks Of Oppression, Of Misery, She Will Speak Of It In Exactly The Same Way As A Man. But If She Speaks Of Her Own Personal Problems As A Woman, She Will Obviously Speak In Another Way.

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

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.

One Is Not Born, But Rather Becomes, 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.

We Must Not Confuse The Present With The Past. With Regard To The Past, No Further Action Is Possible.

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

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

--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.

The American Woman's Inequality With Men Is Proved By Her Defiant Attitude.

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

The Sahara Was A Spectacle As Alive As The Sea. The Tints Of The Dunes Changed According To The Time Of Day And The Angle Of The Light: Golden As Apricots From Far Off, When We Drove Close To Them They Turned To Freshly Made Butter; Behind Us They Grew Pink; From Sand To Rock, The Materials Of Which The Desert Was Made Varied As Much As Its Tints.

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.

All Oppression Creates A State Of War.

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." (p. 248)

Work Would Be Terribly Boring If One Did Not Play The Game All Out, Passionately.

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.

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

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

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

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.

It Is Doubtless Impossible To Approach Any Human Problems With A Mind Free From Bias.

It's Only Arrogance If You're Wrong.

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.

It Is In Great Part The Anxiety Of Being A Woman That Devastates The Feminine Body.

In Every Society The Artist Or Writer Remains An Outsider.

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.

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

You Can't Assume The Responsibility For Everything You Do Or Don't Do.

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

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.

Each Of Us Is Responsible For Everything And To Every Human Being.

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.

The Role Of A Retired Person Is No Longer To Possess One.

A Foreign Country Can Best Be Understood Through Its Literature.

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.

Americans Are Nature-lovers: But They Only Admit Of Nature Proofed And Corrected By Man.

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

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

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

It Was Easier For Me To Think Of A World Without A Creator Than Of A Creator Loaded With All The Contradictions Of The World.

There Was A Time, In The Nineteenth Century, For Example, When Women Spoke Mostly About The House, Children, Birth, And So Forth, Because It Was Their Domain. That's Changing A Little, Now.

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.

If You Are Truly On The Left, If You Reject Ideas Of Power And Hierarchy, What You Want Is Equality. Otherwise, It Won't Work At All.

Women Have Been Burnt As Witches Simply Because They Were Beautiful.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

The Communists, Following Hegel, Speak Of Humanity And Its Future As Of Some Monolithic Individuality. I Was Attacking This Illusion.

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.

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.

There Is No Such Thing As A Natural Death: Nothing That Happens To A Man Is Ever Natural, Since His Presence Calls The World Into Question. All Men Must Die: But For Every Man His Death Is An Accident And, Even If He Knows It And Consents To It, An Unjustifiable Violation.

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

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

In 1949, I Believed That Social Progress, The Triumph Of The Proletariat, Socialism Would Lead To The Emancipation Of Women. But I Saw That Nothing Came Of It: First Of All, That Socialism Was Not Achieved Anywhere, And That In Certain Countries Which Called Themselves Socialist, The Situation Of Women Was No Better Than It Was In So-called Capitalist Countries.

What An Odd Thing A Diary Is: The Things You Omit Are More Important Than Those You Put In.

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

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Dennis Bergkamp

Vicente Del Bosque

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