Retirement revives the sorrow of parting, the feeling of abandonment, solitude and uselessness that is caused by the loss of some beloved person.
Christian ideology has contributed no little to the oppression of woman.
The arrogance of some Christians would close heaven to them if, to their misfortune, it existed.
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.
In every society the artist or writer remains an outsider...
Society turns away from the aged worker as though he belonged to another species. That is why the whole question is buried in a conspiracy of silence. Old age exposes the failure of our entire civilization.
Sign of old age: distress at all leave-takings, all separations. And the sadness of memories, because I’m aware they’re condemned to death.
That is what chills your spine when you read an account of a suicide: not the frail corpse hanging from the window bars but what happened inside that heart immediately before.
Why one man rather than another? It was odd. You find yourself involved with a fellow for life just because he was the one that you met when you were nineteen.
Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.
I cannot be angry at God, in whom I do not believe.
When women act like women, they are accused of being inferior. When women act like human beings, they are accused of behaving like men.
Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly.
A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.
You can’t assume the responsibility for everything you do or don’t do.
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.
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?
I don’t want to be just another blade of grass.
We must not confuse the present with the past. With regard to the past, no further action is possible.
To protest in the name of morality against ‘excesses’ or ‘abuses’ is an error which hints on active complicity. There are no ‘abuses’ or ‘excesses’ here, simpily an all-pervasive system.