Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms. For each of them, love would be the revelation of the self through the gift of the self and the enrichment of the universe.
I take on a shape and an existence only if I first throw myself into the world by loving, by doing.
If I were proud of anything in my life, it would be of our love. I feel we have to tell to each other as many things as we can, so we are not only lovers, but the closest of friends at the same time.
Jealousy is not contemptible, real love has a beak and claws.
It is in great part the anxiety of being a woman that devastates the feminine body.
Existence must be asserted in the present if one does not want all life to be defined as an escape toward nothingness.
Women have been burnt as witches simply because they were beautiful.
She was trying to get rid of a religious hangover.
Many things would be changed for Americans if they would only admit that there is ill-luck in this world and that misfortune is not a priori a crime.
Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction...
A foreign country can best be understood through its literature.
Dwelling-place and food are useful for life but give it no significance: the immediate goals of the housekeeper are only means, not true ends.
History is a great cemetery: men, deeds, ideas are always dying as soon as they are born.
I had never believed in the sacred nature of literature. God had died when I was fourteen...
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.
Americans are nature-lovers: but they only admit of nature proofed and corrected by man.
A writer is hoisted up onto a pedestal only to scrutinize him more closely and conclude that it was a mistake to put him up there in the first place.
The most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman’s concrete situation.
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.
Sometimes speech is no more than a device for saying nothing – and a neater one than silence.