Quotes from Simone de Beauvoir

The fact is that a true human privilege is based upon the anatomical privilege only in virtue of the total situation. Psychoanalysis can establish its truths only in the historical context.

La stupidità ci faceva ridere, era uno dei nostri grandi motivi di spasso, ma aveva anche qualcosa di spaventevole. Se avesse prevalso, non avremmo più avuto il diritto di pensare, di prendere in giro, di provare veri desideri, veri piaceri. Bisognava combatterla o rinunciare a vivere.

He would talk and talk and talk; the twilight would fill with cigarette smoke and shimmering words would tremble in the blue coils of air...

She asked us to raise the curtain that was covering the window and she looked at the golden leaves of the trees. 'How lovely. I shouldn't see that from my flat!' She smiled. And both of us, my sister and I, had the same thought: it was that same smile that had dazzled us when we were little children, the radiant smile of a young woman. Where had it been between then and now?

Même les manifestations et les initiatives féminines n'ont pris de valeur que lorsqu'une décision masculine les a efficacement prolongées.

It was an odd experience, this bringing to life of pages born of my pen and forgotten. From time to time they interested me -- they surprised me as much as if someone else had written them; yet I recognized the vocabulary, the shape of the sentences, the drive, the elliptical forms, the mannerisms. These pages were soaked through and through with my self -- there was a sickening intimacy about it, like the smell of a bedroom in which one has been shut up too long.

Literature is born when something in life goes slightly adrift.

I hadn't known Chancel very well, but ten days earlier I had seen him laughing with the others around the Christmas tree. Maybe Robert was right; the distance between the living and the dead really isn't very great. And yet, like myself, those future corpses who were drinking their coffee in silence appeared ashamed to be so alive.

she gives birth in pain, she heals males' wounds, she nurses the newborn and buries the dead; of man she knows all that offends his pride and humiliates his will. While inclining before him and submitting flesh to spirit, she remains on the carnal borders of the spirit; and she contests the sharpness of hard masculine architecture by softening the angles; she introduces free luxury and unforeseen grace.

There is no such thing as maternal instinct: the word does not in any case apply to the human species. The mother's attitude is defined by her total situation and by the way she accepts it.

For the first time I saw her as a dead body under suspended sentence.

Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death.

But the answer is obvious: it is easy to believe one is sovereign when alone, to believe oneself strong when carefully refusing to bear any burden.

Everything that men have written about women should be viewed with suspicion, because they are both judge and party,' wrote Poulain de la Barre,11 a little-known seventeenth-century feminist.

This privilege, which he alone possesses, of being a sovereign and unique subject amidst a universe of objects, is what he shares with all his fellow-men. In turn an object for others, he is nothing more than an individual in the collectivity on which he depends.

The relation of woman to husband, of of daughter to father, of sister to brother, is a relation of vassalage.

I was too enamored of truth ever to mourn lost illusions.

If I had rediscovered in Heaven, amplified to infinity, the monstrous alliance of fragility and implacability, of caprice and artificial necessity which had oppressed me since my birth, rather than worship Him I would have chosen damnation.

Suddenly I was struck motionless: I was living through the first chapter of a novel in which I was the heroine; she was still almost a child, but we, too, were growing up.

Y con la amistad pasa como con el amor físico: para que sea auténtica tiene que ser ante todo libre.

It takes a lot of strength, a lot of pride or a lot of love to believe that what one man does has any importance, or that life can conquer death.

I was convinced that I would be, that I was already, one in a million.

The Social Security's medical consultants support the interest not of the victims but of the organization.

Only man can be an enemy for man; only he can rob him of the meaning of his acts and his life because it also belongs only to him alone to confirm it in its existence, to recognize it in actual fact as a freedom