Quote collection
355 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Eating, sleeping, cleaning - the years no longer rise up toward heaven, they lie spread out ahead, gray and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won. Washing, ironing, sweeping, ferreting out rolls of lint from under wardrobes - all this halting of decay is also the denial of life; for time simultaneously creates and destroys, and only its negative aspect concerns the housekeeper."
"If women really did have complete equality with men, society would be completely overturned."
"Each person has his or her own very particular history and after all, the unconscious is the most secret part of ourselves."
"immortality is a terrible curse."
"Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to."
"A life is such a strange object, at one moment translucent, at another utterly opaque, an object I make with my own hands, an object imposed on me, an object for which the world provides the raw material and then steals it from me again, pulverized by events, scattered, broken, scored yet retaining its unity; how heavy it is and how inconsistent: this contradiction breeds many misunderstandings."
"People seem to think that if you keep your head empty you automatically fill your balls."
"To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself."
"History is a great cemetery: men, deeds, ideas are always dying as soon as they are born."
"All the idols made by man, however terrifying they may be, are in point of fact subordinate to him, and that is why he will always have it in his power to destroy them."
"The ideal of happiness has always taken material form in the house, whether cottage or castle; it stands for permanence and separation from the world."
"When an individual (or a group of individuals) is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he is inferior."
"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."
"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."
"it is true that nothing is gained without something being lost: everyone knows that in fulfilling oneself one necessarily sacrifices some possibilities."
"A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong."
"Harmony between two individuals is never granted-it has to be conquered indefinitely."
"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."
"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."
"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."