Simone de Beauvoir
There are so many problems. Women can go to work on these as well without giving up their feminism.Collection: Giving Up
Can one say that there is a way of crying out, of speaking, which is properly feminine? Personally, I don't think so. In the end, I find this is another way of putting women in a kind of singularity, a ghetto, which is not what I want. I want them to be singular and universal at the same time.Collection: Ghetto
To create a language all of a piece which would be a women's language, that I find quite insane. There does not exist a mathematics which is only a women's mathematics, or a feminine science.Collection: Insane
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.Collection: Choices
The writer can't stop her unconscious from showing up, that's certain.Collection: Showing Up
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.Collection: Light
Feminism is one way of attacking society as it now exists.Collection: Feminism
Writing is a trade ... which is learned by writing.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Sex
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.Collection: Unique
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.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Being Yourself
That a whole part of the middle class detests me... is utterly normal. I would be troubled if the contrary were true.Collection: Class
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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Hands
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.Collection: Journey
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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Fate
Françoise could not help taking a surreptitious glance at Xavière: she gave a start of amazement. Xavière was no longer watching, her head was lowered. Françoise barely suppressed a scream. The girl was pressing the lighted end against her skin, a bitter smile curling her lips. It was an intimate, solitary smile, like that of a half-wit; the voluptuous, tortured smile of a woman possessed of some secret pleasure.Collection: Girl
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!Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Writing
Picasso never thought of himself as avant-garde. I just find it a bad way to think of yourself.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Kings
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.Collection: Insane
We always come back to the same vicious circle - an extreme degree of material or intellectual poverty does away with the means of alleviating it.Collection: Mean
Few books are more thrilling than certain confessions, but they must be honest, and the author must have something to confess.Collection: Book
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?Collection: Couple
No existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself.Collection: Existential
The role of a retired person is no longer to possess one.Collection: Retirement
One is not conceived a lady, one turns into one.Collection: Turns
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Book
Patience is one of those feminine qualities which have their origin in our oppression but should be preserved after our liberation.Collection: Quality
Only a woman can write what it is to feel as a woman, to be a woman.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Country
It's not a very big step from contentment to complacency.Collection: Contentment
When an individual (or a group of individuals) is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he is inferior.Collection: Feminism
To be a woman, if not a defect, is at least a peculiarity.Collection: Women
The human species is forever in a state of change, forever becoming.Collection: Forever
Each person has his or her own very particular history and after all, the unconscious is the most secret part of ourselves.Collection: Secret
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.Collection: Mother
To be moral is to discover fundamentally ones own being.Collection: Moral
The ballot box is a most inadequate mechanism of change.Collection: Boxes
People seem to think that if you keep your head empty you automatically fill your balls.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Spring
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.Collection: Blow
I like everyone who tries to show that madness is, in large part, conditioned by society and particularly by the family, and therefore, strongly affects women.Collection: Trying
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.Collection: Time