Simone de Beauvoir
Cooking is revolution and creation.Collection: Cooking
I was very fond of Lagneau’s phrase: “I have no comfort but in my absolute despair.Collection: Despair
There has to be a certain relationship between the life and the writing style, and that is really a problem.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Sex
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.Collection: Jobs
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Thinking
Literature in France seems to be undergoing a crisis now, and nothing comes immediately to mind.Collection: Mind
Choice springs from the totality of the person. Thus, to study, to analyze what a person is, does not eliminate the idea of freedom.Collection: Spring
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.Collection: Trying
You can't define the future. And in my opinion, you can't define the avant-garde.Collection: Avant Garde
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Understanding
The arrogance of some Christians would close heaven to them if, to their misfortune, it existed.Collection: Christian
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.Collection: Believe
At bottom, antipsychiatry is still psychiatry. And it doesn't really address itself to women's problems.Collection: Addresses
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.Collection: Past
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.Collection: Men
Retirement revives the sorrow of parting, the feeling of abandonment, solitude and uselessness that is caused by the loss of some beloved person.Collection: Retirement
We can reorient science - for example, a kind of medicine much more directed toward the enormous number of women's health problems which are neglected now. But the original givens of this science are the same for men and for women. Women simply have to steal the instrument; they don't have to break it, or try, a priori, to make of it something totally different. Steal it and use it for their own good.Collection: Men
We belong to this earth. Now I can see the truth ... I love you on this earth of ours. Love me, do!Collection: Love You
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.Collection: Father
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Brother
Americans are nature-lovers: but they only admit of nature proofed and corrected by man.Collection: Nature
Indeed, there is nothing more arbitrary than intervening as a stranger in a destiny which is not ours.Collection: Destiny
You can't address yourself to women by speaking a language which no average woman will understand. In my opinion, it's wrong.Collection: Average
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.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Children
A foreign country can best be understood through its literature.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Men
The innumerable conflicts that set men and women against one another come from the fact that neither is prepared to assume all the consequences of this situation which the one has offered and the other accepted.Collection: Men
Let women be provided with living strength of their own.Collection: Strength
I cannot be angry at God, in whom I do not believe.Collection: Atheist
One can not start by saying that our earthly destiny has or has not importance, for it depends upon us to give it importance.Collection: Destiny
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.Collection: Time
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.Collection: Beautiful
Many things would be changed for Americans if they would only admit that there is ill-luck in this world and that misfortune is not a priori a crime.Collection: Luck
If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline also to explain her through "the eternal feminine," and if nevertheless we admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question: what is a woman?Collection: Female
There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.Collection: Travel
I admire Freud a great deal as a person and thinker. Despite everything, I find his work very, very rich, but I think that for women he has been absolutely disastrous. And even more so, everyone who came after him.Collection: Thinking
Anger or revolt that does not get into the muscles remains a figment of the imagination.Collection: Imagination
I would certainly like to see some young women take up psychoanalysis seriously and reconstruct it from an absolutely new viewpoint.Collection: Viewpoints
Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.Collection: War
Those interested in perpetuating present conditions are always in tears about the marvelous past that is about to disappear, without having so much as a smile for the young future.Collection: Change
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.Collection: Heart
All the opportunities you let slip by! The idea, the inspiration just doesn´t come fast enough. Instead of being open, you´re closed up tight. That´s the worst sin of all - the sin of omission.Collection: Inspiration
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.Collection: Marriage