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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.

-Simone De Beauvoir

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I Would Stand Transfixed

Simone De Beauvoir

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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.

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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.

At Bottom, Antipsychiatry Is Still Psychiatry. And It Doesn't Really Address Itself To Women's Problems.

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.

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 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.

Old Age Is Life's Parody.

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

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

There Are Jobs That Can Be Done Equally Well By Men Or By Women And That Finally You Can't See A Difference. But From The Moment That You Involve Yourself Fully In Writing A Novel, For Example, Or An Essay, Then You Are Involved As A Woman, In The Same Way That You Can't Deny Your Nationality - You Are French, You Are A Man, You Are A Woman... All This Passes Into The Writing.

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

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

There Is A Kind Of Universality In The Human Condition, Masculine Or Feminine. That's One Thing I Continue To Believe.

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

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

To Be Moral Is To Discover Fundamentally Ones Own Being.

The Word Love Has By No Means The Same Sense For Both Sexes, And This Is One Cause Of The Serious Misunderstandings That Divide Them.

I Am Incapable Of Conceiving Infinity, And Yet I Do Not Accept Finity. I Want This Adventure That Is The Context Of My Life To Go On Without End.

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

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

Living By Proxy Is Always A Precarious Expedient.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

All Success Cloaks A Surrender

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

That's What I Consider True Generosity. You Give Your All, And Yet You Always Feel As If It Costs You Nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Retirement Revives The Sorrow Of Parting, The Feeling Of Abandonment, Solitude And Uselessness That Is Caused By The Loss Of Some Beloved Person.

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.

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

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

Ah, If Only There Were Two Of Me, She Thought, One Who Spoke And The Other Who Listened, One Who Lived And One Who Watched, How I Would Love Myself! I Would Envy No One.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

To Protest In The Name Of Morality Against 'excesses' Or 'abuses' Is An Error Which Hints On Active Complicity. There Are No 'abuses' Or 'excesses' Here, Simpily An All-pervasive System.

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.

What Would Prince Charming Have For Occupation If He Had Not To Awaken The Sleeping Beauty?

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.

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

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

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

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.

Weakness' Is Weakness Only In Light Of The Aims Man Sets For Himself, The Instruments At His Disposal And The Laws He Imposes.

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

The Ballot Box Is A Most Inadequate Mechanism Of Change.

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

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.

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

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.

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

To Be A Woman, If Not A Defect, Is At Least A Peculiarity.

Ce N'est Gue' Re Que Dans Les Asiles Que Les Coquettes Gardent Avec Ente" Tement Une Foi Entie' Re En Des Regards Absents; Normalement, Elles Re Clament Des Te Moins. Women Fond Of Dress Are Hardly Ever Entirely Satisfied Not To Be Seen, Except Among The Insane; Usually They Want Witnesses.

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."

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.

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

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.

The Body Is The Instrument Of Our Hold On The World.

Literature Is Always What The Dominant Ideology Recognizes As Literature.

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.

If You Live Long Enough, You'll See That Every Victory Turns Into A Defeat.

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."

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)

Buying Is A Profound Pleasure.

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

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

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.

All Oppression Creates A State Of War.

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.

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

You Have Never Had Any Confidence In Him. And If He Has No Confidence In Himself It Is Because He Sees Himself Through Your Eyes.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Inspirational Life

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

Words Have To Murder Reality Before They Can Hold It Captive.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Virginia Woolf Thought A Lot About Her Own Sex When She Wrote. In The Best Sense Of The Word, Her Writing Is Very Feminine, And By That I Mean That Women Are Supposed To Be Very Sensitive To All The Sensations Of Nature, Much More So Than Men, Much More Contemplative. It's This Quality That Marks Her Best Works.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Immortality Is A Terrible Curse.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

It's Only Arrogance If You're Wrong.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

No Woman Should Be Authorized To Stay At Home And Raise Her Children. Society Should Be Totally Different. Women Should Not Have That Choice, Precisely Because If There Is Such A Choice, Too Many Women Will Make That One.

The Women Of Today Are In A Fair Way To Dethrone The Myth Of Femininity; They Are Beginning To Affirm Their Independence In Concrete Ways; But They Do Not Easily Succeed In Living Completely The Life Of A Human Being.

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

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.

She Was Not To Look Beyond Herself For The Meaning Of Her Life.

Oppression Tries To Defend Itself By Its Utility.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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. The Housewife Wears Herself Out Marking Time: She Makes Nothing, Simply Perpetuates The Present … Eating, Sleeping, Cleaning – The Years No Longer Rise Up Towards Heaven, They Lie Spread Out Ahead, Grey And Identical. The Battle Against Dust And Dirt Is Never Won.

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

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.

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

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.

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

A Darwinian Nation Of Economic Fitness Abhors Idleness, Dependence, Non-productivity.

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

Art Is An Attempt To Integrate Evil.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

The Younger And Healthier A Woman Is And The More Her New And Glossy Body Seems Destined For Eternal Freshness, The Less Useful Is Artifice; But The Carnal Weakness Of This Prey That Man Takes And Its Ominous Deterioration Always Have To Be Hidden From Him...in Any Case, The More Traits And Proportions Of A Woman Seem Contrived, The More She Delighted The Heart Of Man Because She Seemed To Escape The Metamorphosis Of Natural Things. The Result Is This Strange Paradox That By Desiring To Grasp Nature, But Transfigured, In Woman, Man Destines Her To Artifice.

A Man Of The Right Doesn't Write In The Same Way As A Man Of The Left, You Can See That Right Away, Or A Woman Of The Right Or A Woman Of The Left.

History Is A Great Cemetery: Men, Deeds, Ideas Are Always Dying As Soon As They Are Born.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

As Soon As A Woman Re- Fuses To Be Perfectly Happy Doing Housework Eight Hours A Day, Society Has A Tendency To Want To Do A Lobotomy On Her.

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

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.

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

It Is Impossible To Do Anything For Anyone.

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

Buying Is Profound Pleasure.

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.

Some Things I Loved Have Vanished. A Great Many Others Have Been Given To Me

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Each Person Has His Or Her Own Very Particular History And After All, The Unconscious Is The Most Secret Part Of Ourselves.

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.

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

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.

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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