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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.

-Simone De Beauvoir

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My Life Was Hurrying,

Simone De Beauvoir

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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.

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The Day Had Been Spent In The Expectation Of These Hours, And Now They Were Crumbling Away, Becoming, In Their Turn, Another Period Of Expectancy...it Was A Journey Without End, Leading To An Indefinite Future, Eternally Shifting Just As She Was Reaching The Present.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

My Worst Mistake Has Been Not Grasping That Time Goes By. It Was Going By And There I Was, Set In The Attitude Of The Ideal Wife Of An Ideal Husband. Instead Of Bringing Our Sexual Relationship To Life Again I Brooded Happily Over Memories Of Our Former Nights Together.

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

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

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

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!

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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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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Inspirational Life

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I Wish That Every Human Life Might Be Pure Transparent Freedom.

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.

Living By Proxy Is Always A Precarious Expedient.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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Writing ... Is A Profession That Can Only Be Learned By Writing.

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

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The Way I Approached A Question, My Habit Of Mind, The Way I Looked At Things, What I Took For Granted - All This Was Myself And It Did Not Seem To Me That I Could Alter It.

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.

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Political Revolution

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

If You Are Writing Something In Which You Are Really Involved, You Don't Even Need To Think About It Any Longer. The Situation Itself Demands Your Total Commitment As An Individual, Just As In Your Political Commitments.

When An Individual (or A Group Of Individuals) Is Kept In A Situation Of Inferiority, The Fact Is That He Is Inferior.

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

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

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.

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.

It's Not A Very Big Step From Contentment To Complacency.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Literature Is Born When Something In Life Goes Slightly Adrift.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

She Was Trying To Get Rid Of A Religious Hangover.

To Be Moral Is To Discover Fundamentally Ones Own Being.

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.

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

The Ballot Box Is A Most Inadequate Mechanism Of Change.

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.

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.

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.

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

A Couple Who Go On Living Together Merely Because That Was How They Began, Without Any Other Reason: Was That What We Were Turning Into?

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.

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

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.

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.

I Think There Is A Great Tendency Toward Autobiography Among Women Today. It Is Perhaps Facile - And I Say That Even Though I Have Written One Myself.

In Every Society The Artist Or Writer Remains An Outsider.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

The Notion Of Ambiguity Must Not Be Confused With That Of Absurdity. To Declare That Existence Is Absurd Is To Deny That It Can Ever Be Given A Meaning; To Say That It Is Ambiguous Is To Assert That Its Meaning Is Never Fixed, That It Must Be Constantly Won. Absurdity Challenges Every Ethics; But Also The Finished Rationalization Of The Real Would Leave No Room For Ethics; It Is Because Man's Condition Is Ambiguous That He Seeks, Through Failure And Outrageousness, To Save His Existence.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Buying Is A Profound Pleasure.

I Cannot Be Angry At God, In Whom I Do Not Believe.

Positive Atheism

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Oppression Tries To Defend Itself By Its Utility.

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

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.

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

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

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Edward Everett Hale

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