And without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one's liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.
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?
Modern woman is everywhere permitted to regard her body as capital for exploitation.
Her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly.
Counselling man to treat her as a slave while persuading her that she is a queen.
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 b...
Woman has ovaries and a uterus; such are the particular conditions that lock her in her subjectivity; some even say she thinks with her hormones. Man vainly forgets that his anatomy also contains horm...
When she does not find love, she may find poetry. Because she does not act, she observes, she feels, she records; a color, a smile awakens profound echoes within her; her destiny is outside her, scatt...
We will not let ourselves be intimidated by the number and violence of attacks against women; nor be fooled by the self-serving praise showered on the real woman; nor be won over by men’s enthusiasm f...
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.
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 co...
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; so to say it is ambiguous is to assert that it'...
Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth.
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 lif...
Les cas extrêmes nous attachaient, au même titre que les névroses et les psychoses : on y retrouvait exagérées, épurées, dotées d'un saisissant relief les attitudes et les passions des gens qu'on appe...
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 co...
I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain...
How will the fact of being women have affected our lives? What precise opportunities have been given us, and which ones have been denied? What destiny awaits our younger sisters, and in which directio...
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.
All success cloaks a surrender