Quotes from Alice Kaplan

With that solitude came the greatest luxuries: the time to read, the opportunity to wander, and the chance to think new thoughts.

Beauvoir was untouched by the criticisms; her diary was a record of one consciousness, her own: "This is what I saw and how I saw it. I have not tried to say more.

The Bouviers and the Lees alike operated within the great American tradition of immigrant ambition, which held that in making yourself anew, you had the right to embellish the past.

I remembered how de Man had said to us in class, 'don't confuse any of this literary theory with your lives'—how we hadn't believed him, how we had wanted our criticism to tell us how to think and how to speak and how to live. De Man made literature matter more than anything in the world and then said it was only literature.

Nous nous sommes dévoilés.

It was Malraux, who guided her through the Louvre in 1961, who would order the cleaning of the buildings. When he first articulated the plan, one of his colleagues quipped: wouldn't it be cheaper to blacken the Sacré-Coeur?)